SIDNEY 


BERKELEY^ 

LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  Of 
CALIFORNrA 


^ 


J 


JOHN    KEATS 


JOHN  KEATS 

HIS  LIFE  AND   POETRY 
HIS  FRIENDS  CRITICS 

AND 

AFTER- FAME 


BY 

SIDNEY  COLVIN 


NEW  YORK 
CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

1917 


COPTKIOHT,   1917,   BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  November,  1917 


s.  c. 

TO 

F.  C. 


PREFACE 

To  the  name  and  work  of  Keats  our  best  critics  and 
scholars  have  in  recent  years  paid  ever  closer  attention 
and  warmer  homage.  But  their  studies  have  for  the 
most  part  been  specialized  and  scattered,  and  there 
does  not  yet  exist  any  one  book  giving  a  full  and  con- 
nected account  of  his  life  and  poetry  together  in  the 
light  of  oiu"  present  knowledge  and  with  help  of  all 
the  available  material.  Ever  since  it  was  my  part, 
some  thirty  years  ago,  to  contribute  the  voliune  on 
Keats  to  the  series  of  short  studies  edited  by  Lord 
Morley,  (the  English  Men  of  Letters  series),  I  have 
hoped  one  day  to  return  to  the  subject  and  do  my 
best  to  supply  this  want.  Once  released  from  official 
duties,  I  began  to  prepare  for  the  task,  and  through 
the  last  soul-shaking  years,  being  over  age  for  any 
effectual  war-service,  have  found  solace  and  occupation 
in  carrying  it  through. 

The  following  pages,  timed  to  appear  in  the  hundredth 
year  after  the  pubhcation  of  Keats's  first  volume,  are 
the  result.  I  have  sought  in  them  to  combine  two  aims 
not  always  easy  to  be  reconciled,  those  of  holding  the 
interest  of  the  general  reader  and  at  the  same  time  of 
satisfying,  and  perhaps  on  some  points  even  inform- 
ing, the  special  student.  I  have  tried  to  set  forth 
consecutively  and  fully  the  history  of  a  life  outwardly 

vii 


viii  PREFACE 

remarkable  for  nothing  but  its  tragic  brevity,  but 
inwardly  as  crowded  with  imaginative  and  emotional 
experience  as  any  on  record,  and  moreover,  owing 
to  the  open-heartedness  of  the  man  and  to  the  pre- 
servation and  unreserved  publication  of  his  letters, 
lying  bare  almost  more  than  any  other  to  our  know- 
ledge. Further,  considering  for  how  much  friendship 
counted  in  Keats^s  life,  I  have  tried  to  call  up  the 
group  of  his  friends  about  him  in  their  human  linea- 
ments and  relations,  so  far  as  these  can  be  re- 
covered, more  fully  than  has  been  attempted  before. 
I  beheve  also  that  I  have  been  able  to  trace  more 
closely  than  has  yet  been  done  some  of  the  chief 
sources,  both  in  Uterature  and  in  works  of  art,  of  his 
inspiration.  I  have  endeavoured  at  the  same  time  to 
make  felt  the  critical  and  poetical  atmosphere,  with  its 
various  and  strongly  conflicting  currents,  amid  which 
he  lived,  and  to  show  how  his  genius,  almost  ignored  in 
its  own  day  beyond  the  circle  of  his  private  friends,  was 
a  focus  in  which  many  vital  streams  of  poetic  tendency 
from  the  past  centred  and  from  which  many  radiated 
into  the  future.  To  illustrate  this  last  point  it  has  been 
necessary,  by  way  of  epilogue,  to  sketch,  however  briefly, 
the  story  of  his  posthumous  fame,  his  after  life  in  the 
minds  and  hearts  of  English  writers  and  readers  imtil 
to-day.  By  English  I  mean  all  those  whose  mother  lan- 
guage is  English.  To  follow  the  extension  of  Keats's 
fame  to  the  Continent  is  outside  my  aim.  He  has  not 
yet,  by  means  of  translation  and  comment  in  foreign 
languages,  become  in  any  fuU  sense  a  world-poet.  But 
during  the  last  thirty  years  the  process  has  begun, 
and  there  would  be  a  good  deal  to  say,  did  my  scheme 
admit  it,  of  work  upon  Keats  done  abroad,  especially 


PREFACE  ix 

in  France,  where  our  literature  has  during  the  last 
generation  been  studied  with  such  admirable  inteUi- 
gence  and  care. 

In  an  attempt  of  this  scope,  I  have  necessarily  had  to 
repeat  matters  of  common  knowledge  and  to  say  again 
things  that  others  have  said  well  and  sufficiently  already. 
But  working  from  materials  hitherto  in  part  untouched, 
and  taking  notice  of  such  new  hghts  as  have  appeared 
while  my  task  was  in  progress,  I  have  drawn  from  them 
some  conclusions,  both  biographical  and  critical,  which 
I  beheve  to  be  my  own  and  which  I  hope  may  stand. 
I  have  not  shrunk  from  quoting  in  full  poems  and 
portions  of  poems  which  everybody  knows,  in  cases 
where  I  wanted  the  reader  to  have  their  text  not  merely 
in  memory  but  actually  before  him,  for  re-studying 
with  a  fresh  comment  or  in  some  new  connexion.  I 
have  also  quoted  very  largely  from  the  poet's  letters, 
even  now  not  nearly  as  much  read  as  things  so  full  of 
genius  should  be,  both  in  order  that  some  of  his  story 
may  be  told  in  his  own  words  and  for  the  sake  of  that 
part  of  his  mind — Si  great  and  most  interesting  part — 
which  is  expressed  in  them  but  has  not  foimd  its  way 
into  his  poems.  It  must  be  added  that  when  I  found 
things  in  my  former  small  book  which  I  did  not  see  my 
way  to  better  and  which  seemed  to  fit  into  the  expanded 
scale  of  this  one,  I  have  not  hesitated  sometimes  to 
incorporate  them — ^to  the  amount  perhaps  of  forty  or 
fifty  pages  in  all. 

I  wish  I  could  hope  that  my  work  will  be  found  such 
as  to  justify  the  amount  and  variety  of  friendly  help  I 
have  had  in  its  preparation.  Thanks  for  such  help  are 
due  in  more  quarters  than  I  can  well  call  to  mind. 


X  PREFACE 

First  and  foremost,  to  Lord  Crewe  for  letting  me  have 
free  and  constant  access  to  his  imrivalled  collection  of 
original  documents  connected  with  the  subject,  both 
those  inherited  from  his  father  (referred  to  in  the  notes 
as  'Houghton  MSS.')  and  those  acquired  in  recent 
years  by  himself  (referred  to  as  'Crewe  MSS/).  Speak- 
ing generally,  it  may  be  assumed  that  new  matter  for 
which  no  authority  is  quoted  is  taken  from  these  sources. 
To  Miss  Henrietta  Woodhouse  of  Weston  Lea,  Albury, 
I  am  indebted  for  valuable  documentary  and  other 
information  concerning  her  uncle  Richard  Woodhouse. 
Next  in  importance  among  collections  of  Keats  docu- 
ments to  that  of  Lord  Crewe  is  that  of  Mr  J.  P.  Morgan 
in  New  York,  the  chief  contents  of  which  have  by  his 
leave  been  transcribed  for  me  with  the  kindliest  dih- 
gence  by  his  Hbrarian  Miss  Greene.  For  other  illustra- 
tive documents  existing  in  America,  I  believe  of  value, 
I  should  like  to  be  able  to  thank  their  owners,  Mr  Day 
and  Mr  Louis  Holman  of  Boston:  but  these  gentlemen 
made  a  condition  of  their  help  the  issue  of  a  Hmited 
edition  de  luxe  of  the  book  specially  illustrated  from 
their  material,  a  condition  the  pubUshers  judged  it  im- 
possible to  carry  out,  at  any  rate  in  war-time. 

Foremost  among  my  scholarly  helpers  at  home  has  been 
my  friend  Professor  W.  P.  Ker,  who  has  done  me  the 
great  kindness  of  reading  through  my  proofs.  For  in- 
formation and  suggestions  in  answer  to  enquiries  of  one 
kind  or  another  I  am  indebted  to  Professor  Israel  GoUancz 
and  Mr  Henry  Bradley;  to  Professor  Ernest  Weekley,  the 
best  living  authority  on  surnames;  to  Mr  A.  H.  Bullen; 
to  Mr  Falconer  Madan  and  Mr  J.  W.  Mackail;  to  Mr 
Thomas  J.  Wise;  and  to  my  former  pupil  and  col- 
league Mr  A.  H.  Smith,  Keeper  of  Greek  and  Roman 


PREFACE  xi 

Antiquities  at  the  British  Museum.  Mr  George  Whale 
suppHed  me  with  full  copies  of  and  comments  on  the 
entries  concerning  Keats  in  the  books  of  Guy's  Hospital. 
Dr  Hambley  Rowe  of  Bradford  put  at  my  disposal  the 
results,  unfortimately  not  yet  conclusive,  of  the  re- 
searches made  by  him  as  a  zealous  Comishman  on  Keats's 
possible  Cornish  descent.  I  must  not  omit  thanks  to 
Mr  Emery  Walker  for  his  skill  and  pains  in  preparing  the 
illustrations  for  my  book.  With  reference  to  these,  I 
may  note  that  the  head  from  the  portrait  painted  by 
Severn  in  1859  and  now  in  Lord  Crewe's  possession  was 
chosen  for  colour  reproduction  as  frontispiece  because 
it  is  the  fullest  in  colouring  and,  though  done  from 
memory  so  long  after  the  poet's  death,  to  my  mind 
the  most  satisfying  and  convincing  in  general  air  of  any 
of  the  extant  portraits.  Of  the  miniature  done  by 
Severn  from  life  in  1818,  copied  and  recopied  by  him- 
self, Charles  Brown  and  others,  and  made  familiar  by 
numberless  reproductions  in  black  and  white,  the 
original,  now  deposited  by  the  Dilke  Trustees  in  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery,  has  the  character  of  a 
monochrome  touched  with  sharp  notes  or  suggestions 
of  colour  in  the  hair,  lips,  hands,  book,  etc.  I  have 
preferred  not  to  repeat  either  this  or  the  equally  well 
known — nay,  hackneyed — and  very  distressing  death- 
bed drawing  made  by  Severn  at  Rome.  The  profile 
from  Haydon's  life-mask  of  the  poet  is  taken,  not,  like 
most  versions  of  the  same  mask,  from  the  plaster,  but 
from  an  electrotype  made  many  years  ago  when  the 
cast  was  fresh  and  showing  the  structm-e  and  modellings 
of  the  head  more  subtly,  in  my  judgment,  than  the 
original  cast  itself  in  its  present  state.  Both  cast  and 
electrotype  are  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery.    So  is 


xii  PREFACE 

the  oil-painting  of  Keats  seated  reading,  begun  by  Severn 
soon  after  the  poet's  death  and  finished  apparently  two 
years  later,  which  I  have  reproduced,  well  known  though 
it  is,  partly  for  its  appositeness  to  a  phrase  in  one  of  his 
letters  to  his  sister.  Besides  the  portraits  of  Keats,  I 
have  added  from  characteristic  sources  those  of  the  two 
men  who  most  influenced  him  at  the  outset  of  his  career, 
Leigh  Hunt  and  Haydon.  A  new  featm*e  in  my  book 
is  provided  by  the  reproductions  of  certain  works  of 
art,  both  pictures  and  antiques,  which  can  be  proved 
or  surmised  to  have  struck  and  stimulated  his  imagina- 
tion. The  reproductions  of  autographs,  one  of  his  own 
and  one  of  Haydon's,  speak  for  themselves. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  I 

1795-1815:    Birth   and   Parentage:    Schooldays   and 

Apprenticeship  --- 1 


CHAPTER  II 

October  1815-March  1817:  Hospital  Studies:  Poetical 

Ambitions:   Leigh  Hunt -       27 


CHAPTER  III 

Winter  1816-1817:   Haydon:   Other  New  Friendships: 

The  Die  Cast  for  Poetry 59 


CHAPTER  IV 
The  'Poems'  of  1817 85 

CHAPTER  V 
April-December  1817:  Work  on  Endymion  -       -       -      130 

CHAPTER  VI 

Endymion. — ^I.    The  Story:    Its  Sources,   Plan,  and 

Symbolism ---164 

xiii 


xhr  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  VII 

PAGB 

Endymion. — ^11.    The    Poetry:      Its     Qualities    and 

Affinities  -- 206 


CHAPTER  VIII 

December    1817-June    1818:     Hampstead   and   Teign- 

mouth:   Emigration  of  George  Keats   -        -        -      242 


CHAPTER  IX 
June-August  1818:   The  Scottish  Tour        -        .        -      272 

CHAPTER  X 

September-December  1818:  Blackwood  and  the  Quar- 
terly: Death  of  Tom  Keats    -        -       -       -        -      297 

CHAPTER  XI 

December  1818-June  1819:   Keats  and  Brown  House- 
Mates:   Fanny  Brawne:   Work  and  Idleness       -      321 

CHAPTER  XII 

June    1819-January    1820:      Shanklin,    Winchester, 

Hampstead:   Trouble  and  Health  Failure  -        -      358 

CHAPTER  XIII 
Work  of  1818,  1819.— I.    The  Achievements  -       -        -      385 

CHAPTER  XIV 

Work  of  1818,  1819. — II.  The  Fragments  and  Experi- 
ments  "      424 


CONTENTS  XV 

CHAPTER  XV 

PAGE 

February- August  1820 :  Hampstead  and  Kentish  Town  : 

Publication  of  Lamia  Volume        -        -        -        -      455 


CHAPTER  XVI 

August  1820-February  1821:   Voyage  to  Italy:   Last 

Days  and  Death  at  Rome       -----      485 


CHAPTER  XVII 

Epilogue  --- -  513 

Appendix  ----- 551 

Index        ----------  559 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


PLATE  PAOB 

I.  Head  of  Keats Frontispiece 

From  a  posthumoiis  oil  painting  by  Joseph  Severn  in  the 
possession  of  the  Marquis  of  Crewe,  K.G. 


n.  Portrait  of  James  Henry  Leigh  Hunt       -       -       46 

From  an  engraving  by  Mayer  after  a  drawing  by  J.  Hayter. 

III.  Portrait  of  Benjamin  Robert  Haydon       -        -       62 

From  an  engraving  by  Thomson  after  Haydon. 

IV.  Life-Mask  of  Keats 144 

From  an  electrotype  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 

V.  'Onward  the  Tiger  and  the  Leopard  Pants, 

With  Asian  Elephants'   -----      230 

From  an  engraving  after  a  sarcophagus  relief  at  Wobum 
Abbey. 

VI.  A  Sacrifice  to  Apollo 264 

From  an  engraving  by  Vivares  and  Woollett  after  Claude. 

VII.  The  Enchanted  Castle 266 

From  an  engraving  by  Vivares  and  Woollett  after  Claude. 

« 

VIII.  'And  there  I'd  sit  and  read  all  Day  like  a 

Picture  of  Somebody  Reading'       -       -       -      338 

From  an  oil  painting  by  Joseph  Severn  in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery. 

xvii 


xviii  LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FLiATK  PAGE 

IX.  'Figures  on  a  Greek  Vase — A  Man  and  Two 

Women' 342 

From  an  etching  in  Piranesi's  Vasi  e  Candelabri. 

X.  Page  from  Isabella;  or,  the  Pot  of  Basil   -       -      394 

From  an  autograph  by  Keats  in  the  British  Musemn.        -"^ 

XI.  The  Sosibios  Vase:   Profile  and  Frieze    -        -      416 

From  an  engraving  in  the  Musie  Napolion. 

XII.  *What  Pipes  and  Timbrels?  what  wild  Ecstasy?'      418 

Bacchanalian  friezes,  (A)  from  the  Townley  Vase  in  the 
British  Museum,  (B)  from  the  Borghese  Vase  in  the  Louvre. 

XIII.  Page  from  a  Letter  op  Haydon  to  Elizabeth 

Barrett,  1834 532 


JOHN    KEATS 


CHAPTER  I 

1795-1815:  BIRTH  AND  PARENTAGE:    SCHOOLDAYS  AND 
APPRENTICESHIP 

Obscure  family  history — The  Finsbury  livery  stable — The  surname  Keats 
— Origin  probably  Cornish — Character  of  parents — Traits  of  childhood 
— ^The  Enfield  School — The  Edmonton  home — The  Pymmes  Brook — 
Testimonies  of  schoolmates — Edward  Holmes — Charles  Cowden  Clarke 
— New  passion  for  reading — Left  an  orphan — Apprenticed  to  a  surgeon 
— Relations  with  his  master — Readings  in  the  poets — The  Faerie 
Qiieene — The  Spenser  fever — Other  poetic  influences — Influences  of 
nature — Early  attempts  in  verse — Early  sympathizers — George  Felton 
Mathew — Move  to  London. 

For  all  the  study  and  research  that  have  lately  been 
spent  on  the  life  and  work  of  Keats,  there  is  one  point 
as  to  which  we  remain  as  much  in  the  dark  as  ever,  and 
that  is  his  family  history.  He  was  bom  at  an  hour  when 
the  gradually  re-awakened  genius  of  poetry  in  our  race, 
I  mean  of  impassioned  and  imaginative  poetry,  was 
ready  to  offer  new  forms  of  spiritual  sustenance,  and  a 
range  of  emotions  both  widened  and  deepened,  to  a 
generation  as  yet  only  half  prepared  to  receive  them. 
If  we  consider  the  other  chief  poets  who  bore  their 
part  in  that  great  revival,  we  can  commonly  recognize 
either  some  strain  of  power  in  their  blood  or  some 
strong  inspiring  quality  in  the  scenery  and  traditions 
of  their  home,  or  both  together.  Granting  that  the 
scenic  and  legendary  romance  of  the  Scottish  border 
wilds  were  to  be  made  live  anew  for  the  delight  of 
the  latter-day  world,  we  seem  to  see  in  Walter  Scott  a 
man  predestined  for  the  task  alike  by  origin,  association, 

1 


2  OBSCURE  FAMILY  HISTORY 

and  opportunity.  Had  the  indwelling  spirit  of  the 
Cumbrian  lakes  and  mountains,  and  their  power  upon 
the  souls  and  lives  of  those  living  among  them,  to  be 
newly  revealed  and  interpreted  to  the  general  mind 
of  man,  where  should  we  look  for  its  spokesman  but 
in  one  of  Wordsworth's  birth  and  training?  What, 
then,  it  may  be  asked,  of  Byron  and  Shelley,  the 
two  great  contrasted  poets  of  revolution,  or  rather  of 
revolt  against  the  counter-revolution,  in  the  younger 
generation, — ^the  one  worldly,  mocking,  half  theatrically 
rebellious  and  Satanic,  the  other  unworldly  even  to 
unearthliness,  a  loving  alien  among  men,  more  than  half 
truly  angelic?  These  we  are  perhaps  rightly  used  to 
coxmt  as  offspring  of  their  age,  with  its  forces  and  fer- 
ments, its  violent  actions  and  reactions,  rather  than  of 
their  ancestry  or  upbringing.  And  yet,  if  we  will,  we 
may  fancy  Byron  inspired  in  Hterature  by  demons  of 
the  same  froward  brood  that  had  urged  others  of  his 
lineage  on  lives  of  adventure  or  of  crime,  and  may 
conceive  that  Shelley  drew  some  of  his  instincts  for 
headlong,  peremptory  self-guidance,  though  in  directions 
most  opposite  to  the  traditional,  from  the  stubborn  and 
wajrward  stock  of  colonial  and  county  aristocracy  whence 
he  sprang. 

Keats,  more  purely  and  exclusively  a  poet  than  any 
of  these,  and  responding  more  intuitively  than  any 
to  the  spell  alike  of  ancient  Greece,  of  mediaeval 
romance,  and  of  the  English  woods  and  fields,  was  born 
in  a  dull  and  middling  walk  of  London  city  life,  and  'if 
by  traduction  came  his  mind', — ^to  quote  Drydenwith 
a  difference, — ^it  was  through  channels  hidden  from  our 
search.  From  his  case  less  even  than  from  Shake- 
speare's can  we  draw  any  argument  as  to  the  influence 
of  heredity  or  environment  on  the  birth  and  growth  of 
genius.  His  origin,  in  spite  of  much  diligent  inquiry, 
has  not  been  traced  beyond  one  generation  on  the 
father's  side  and  two  on  the  mother's.  His  father, 
Thomas  Keats,  was  a  west-country  lad  who  came  young 
to  London,  and  while  still  under  twenty  held  the  place 


THE  FINSBURY  LIVERY-STABLE  3 

of  head  ostler  in  a  K very-stable  kept  by  a  Mr  John 
Jennings  in  Finsbmy.  Seven  or  eight  yeare  later, 
about  the  beginning  of  1795,  he  married  his  employer's 
daughter,  Frances  Jennings,  then  in  her  twentieth 
year.  Mr  Jennings,  who  had  carried  on  a  large  business 
in  north-eastern  London  and  the  neighbouring  suburbs, 
and  was  a  man  of  substance,  retired  about  the  same 
time  to  Hve  in  the  country,  at  Bonder's  End  near 
Edmonton,  leaving  the  management  of  the  business 
in  the  hands  of  his  son-in-law.  At  first  the  young 
couple  Hved  at  the  stable,  at  the  sign  of  the  Swan 
and  Hoop,  Finsbury  Favement,  facing  the  then  open 
space  of  Lower  Moorfields.  Here  their  eldest  child, 
the  poet  John  Keats,  was  born  prematurely  on 
either  the  29th  or  31st  of  October,  1795.  A  second 
son,  named  George,  followed  on  February  28,  1797; 
a  third,  Tom,  on  November  18,  1799;  a  fourth,  Edward, 
who  died  in  infancy,  on  April  28,  1801;  and  on  the 
3rd  of  June,  1803,  a  daughter,  Frances  Mary.  In  the 
meantime  the  family  had  moved  from  the  stable  to  a 
house  in  Craven  Street,  City  Road,  half  a  mile  farther 
north. 

The  Keats  brothers  as  they  grew  up  were  remarked 
for  their  intense  fraternal  feeling  and  strong  vein  of 
family  pride.  But  it  was  a  pride  that  looked  forward 
and  not  back:  they  were  bent  on  raising  the  family 
name  and  credit,  but  seem  to  have  taken  no  interest 
at  all  in  its  history,  and  have  left  no  record  or  tradition 
concerning  their  forbears.  Some  of  their  friends  believed 
their  father  to  have  been  a  Devonshire  man:  their 
sister,  who  long  survived  them,  said  she  remembered 
hearing  as  a  child  that  he  came  from  Cornwall,  near 
the  Land^s  End. 

There  is  no  positive  evidence  enabling  us  to  decide  the 
question.  The  derivation  of  English  surnames  is  apt 
to  be  complicated  and  obscure,  and  'Keats'  is  no 
exception  to  the  rule.  It  is  a  name  widely  distributed 
in  various  counties  of  England,  though  not  very  frequent 
in  any.    It  may  in  some  cases  be  a  possessive  form 


4  THE  SURNAME  I^ATS 

derived  from  the  female  Christian  name  Kate,  on  the 
analogy  of  Jeans  from  Jane,  or  Maggs  from  Margaret: 
but  the  source  accepted  as  generally  probable  for  it 
and  its  several  variants  is  the  Middle-English  adjective 
'kete',  a  word  of  Scandinavian  origin  meaning  bold, 
gallant.  In  the  form  ^Keyte'  the  name  prevails  princi- 
pally in  Warwickshire:  in  the  variants  Keat  (or  Keate) 
and  Keats  (or  Keates^  it  occurs  in  many  of  the  mid- 
land, home,  and  southern,  especially  the  south-western, 
counties. 

Mr  Thomas  Hardy  tells  me  of  a  Keats  family  sprung 
from  a  horsedealer  of  Broadmayne,  Dorsetshire,  members 
of  which  lived  within  his  own  memory  as  farmers  and 
publicans  in  and  near  Dorchester,  one  or  two  of  them 
bearing,  as  he  thought,  a  striking  likeness  to  the  portrait 
of  the  poet.  One  Keats  family  of  good  standing  was 
established  by  the  mid-eighteenth  century  in  Devon, 
in  the  person  of  a  well-known  head-master  of  Blundell's 
school,  Tiverton,  afterwards  rector  of  Bideford.  His  son 
was  one  of  Nelson's  bravest  and  most  famous  captains,  Sir 
Richard  Godwin  Keats  of  the  ^Superb',  and  from  the 
same  stock  sprang  in  our  own  day  the  lady  whose  tales 
of  tragic  and  comic  west-country  life,  pubHshed  under 
the  pseudonym  'Zack',  gave  promise  of  a  literary  career 
which  has  been  unhappily  cut  short.  But  with  this 
Bideford  stock  the  Keats  brothers  can  have  claimed 
no  connexion,  or  as  schoolboys  they  would  assuredly 
have  made  the  prowess  of  their  namesake  of  the  ^Superb' 
their  pride  and  boast,  whereas  in  fact  their  ideal  naval 


^  Between  the  forms  with  and  without  the  final  's'  there  is  no  hard  and 
fast  line  to  be  drawn,  one  getting  changed  into  the  other  either  regularly, 
by  the  normal  addition  of  the  possessive  or  patronymic  suffix,  or  casually, 
through  our  mere  EngUsh  habit  of  phonetic  carelessness  and  sUpshod  pro- 
nunciation. I  learn  from  a  correspondent  belonging  to  the  very  nimierous 
St  Teath  stock,  and  signing  and  known  only  as  Keat,  that  other  members 
of  his  family  call  themselves  Keats.  And  my  friend  Mr  F.  B.  Keate, 
working-man  poet  and  politician  of  Bristol,  whose  forbears  came  from 
Tiverton  and  earlier  probably  from  St  Teath,  assures  me  that  he  is 
addressed  Keates  in  speech  and  writing  as  often  as  not.  There  are  several 
famiUes  in  Bristol,  most  of  them  coming  from  Wilts  or  (as  the  famous 
flogging  headmaster  of  Eton  came)  from  Somerset,  whose  names  are  spelt 
and  spoken  Keat  or  Keats  and  Keate  or  Keates  indifferently. 


ORIGIN  PROBABLY  CORNISH  5 

hero  was  a  much  less  famous  person,  their  mother^s 
brother  Midgley  John  Jennings,  a  tall  lieutenant  of 
marines  who  served  with  some  credit  on  Duncan^s 
flagship  at  Camperdown  and  by  reason  of  his  stature 
was  said  to  have  been  a  special  mark  for  the  enemy's 
musketry.  In  the  form  Keat  or  Keate  the  name  is 
common  enough  both  in  Devon,  particularly  near  Tiver- 
ton, and  in  Cornwall,  especially  in  the  parishes  of  St 
Teath  and  Lanteglos, — ^that  is  round  about  Camelford, — 
3.nd  also  as  far  eastward  as  CaUington  and  westward  as 
St  Columb  Major:  the  last  named  parish  having  been  the 
seat  of  a  family  of  the  name  entitled  to  bear  arms  and 
said  to  have  come  originally  from  Berkshire. 

But  neither  the  records  of  the  Dorsetshire  family, 
nor  search  in  the  parish  registers  of  Devon  and  Cornwall, 
have  as  yet  yielded  the  name  of  any  Thomas  Keat  or 
Keats  as  bom  in  1768,  the  birth-year  of  our  poet's 
father  according  to  our  information.  A  ^Thomas 
Keast',  however,  is  registered  as  having  been  bom 
in  that  year  in  the  parish  of  St  Agnes,  between  New 
Quay  and  Redruth.  Now  Keast  is  a  purely  Cornish 
name,  limited  to  those  parts,  and  it  is  quite  possible 
that,  borne  by  a  Cornishman  coming  to  London,  it 
would  get  changed  into  the  far  commoner  Keats  (a 
somewhat  similar  phonetic  change  is  that  of  Crisp  into 
Cripps).  So  the  identification  of  this  Thomas  Keast 
of  St  Agnes  as  the  father  of  our  Keats  is  not  to  be 
excluded.  The  Jennings  connexion  is  of  itself  a  circum- 
stance which  may  be  held  to  add  to  the  likehhood  of  a 
Cornish  origin  for  the  poet,  Jennings  being  a  name 
frequent  in  the  Falmouth  district  and  occurring  as  far 
westward  as  Lelant.  Children  are  registered  as  born  in 
and  after  1770  of  the  marriage  of  a  John  Jennings  to  a 
Catherine  Keate  at  Penyrn;  and  it  is  a  plausible  con- 
jecture (always  remembering  it  to  be  a  conjecture  and 
no  more)  that  the  prosperous  London  stable-keeper 
John  Jennings  was  himself  of  Cornish  origin,  and 
that  between  him  and  the  lad  Thomas  Keats,  whom 
he  took  so  young  first  as  head  stableman  and  then 


6  CHARACTER  OF  PARENTS 

as  son-in-law,  there  existed  some  previous  family  con- 
nexion or  acquaintance.  These,  however,  are  matters 
piu-ely  conjectural,  and  all  we  really  know  about  the 
poet's  parents  are  the  dates  above  mentioned,  and  the 
fact  that  they  were  certainly  people  somewhat  out 
of  the  ordinary.  Thomas  Keats  was  noticed  in  his 
life-time  as  a  man  of  sense,  spirit,  and  conduct:  ^of 
so  remarkably  fine  a  commonsense  and  native  re- 
spectability,' writes  Cowden  Clarke,  in  whose  father's 
school  the  poet  and  his  brother  were  brought  up, 
'that  I  perfectly  remember  the  warm  terms  in  which 
his  demeanour  used  to  be  canvassed  by  my  parents 
after  he  had  been  to  visit  his  boys/  And  again: — ^I 
have  a  clear  recollection  of  his  Hvely  and  energetic 
countenance,  particularly  when  seated  on  his  gig 
and  preparing  to  drive  his  wife  home  after  visiting 
his  sons  at  school.  In  feature,  stature,  and  manner 
John  resembled  his  father.'  Of  Frances  Keats,  the 
poet's  mother,  we  learn  more  vaguely  that  she  was 
Hall,  of  good  figure,  with  large  oval  face,  and  sensible 
deportment':  and  again  that  she  was  a  lively,  clever, 
impulsive  woman,  passionately  fond  of  amusement,  and 
supposed  to  have  hastened  the  birth  of  her  eldest  child 
by  some  imprudence.  Her  second  son,  George,  wrote 
in  after  life  of  her  and  of  her  family  as  follows: — 'my 
grandfather  Mr  Jennings  was  very  well  off,  as  his  will 
shows,  and  but  that  he  was  extremely  generous  and 
gullible  would  have  been  affluent.  I  have  heard  my 
grandmother  speak  with  enthusiasm  of  his  excellencies, 
and  Mr  Abbey  used  to  say  that  he  never  saw  a  woman 
of  the  talents  and  sense  of  my  grandmother,  except  my 
mother.' 

As  to  the  grandmother  and  her  estimable  quaHties 
all  accounts  are  agreed,  but  of  the  mother  the  witness 
quoted  himself  tells  a  very  different  tale.  This  Mr 
Richard  Abbey  was  a  wholesale  tea-dealer  in  Saint 
Pancras  Lane  and  a  trusted  friend  of  Mr  and  Mrs 
Jennings.  In  a  memorandum  written  long  after  their 
death  he  declares  that  both  as  girl  and  woman  their 


TRAITS  OF  CHILDHOOD  7 

daughter,  the  poet's  mother,  was  a  person  of  unbridled 
temperament,  and  that  in  her  later  years  she  fell  into 
loose  ways  and  was  no  credit  to  her  family.^  Whatever 
truth  there  may  be  in  these  charges,  it  is  certain  that 
she  Kved  to  the  end  under  her  mother's  roof  and  was 
in  no  way  cut  off  from  her  children.  The  eldest  boy 
John  in  particular  she  is  said  to  have  held  in  passionate 
affection,  by  him  passionately  returned.  Once  as  a 
young  child,  when  she  was  ordered  to  be  left  quiet 
during  an  illnesS;  he  is  said  to  have  insisted  on  keeping 
watch  at  her  door  with  an  old  sword,  and  allowing  no 
one  to  go  in.  Haydon,  an  artist  who  loved  to  lay  his 
colours  thick,  gives  this  anecdote  of  the  sword  a  different 
turn: — 'He  was  when  an  infant  a  most  violent  and 
ungovernable  child.  At  five  years  of  age  or  thereabouts, 
he  once  got  hold  of  a  naked  sword  and  shutting  the  door 
swore  nobody  should  go  out.  His  mother  wanted  to  do 
so,  but  he  threatened  her  so  furiously  she  began  to  cry, 
and  was  obliged  to  wait  till  somebody  through  the 
window  saw  her  position  and  came  to  the  rescue.' 
Another  trait  of  the  poet's  childhood,  mentioned  also 
by  Haydon,  on  the  authority  of  a  gammer  who  had 
known  him  from  his  birth,  is  that  when  he  was  first 
learning  to  speak,  instead  of  answering  sensibly,  he  had 
a  trick  of  making  a  rime  to  the  last  word  people  said 
and  then  laughing. 

The  parents  were  ambitious  for  their  boys,  and  would 
have  Hked  to  send  them  to  Harrow,  but  thinking  this 
beyond  their  means,  chose  the  school  kept  by  a  Mr 
John  Clarke  at  Enfield.  The  brothers  of  Mrs  Keats, 
including  the  boys'  admired  uncle,  the  lieutenant  of 
marines,  had  been  educated  here,  and  the  school  was 
one    of    good    repute,    and    of    exceptionally   pleasant 

1  This  document,  a  memorandum  written  for  the  information  of  Keats's 
friend  and  publisher,  John  Taylor,  was  sold  in  London  in  1907.  I  saw  and 
took  rough  note  of  it  before  the  sale,  meaning  to  follow  it  up  afterwards: 
but  circumstances  kept  me  otherwise  fully  occupied,  and  later  I  found 
that  the  buyer,  a  well  known  and  friendly  bookseller,  had  unfortunately 
mislaid  it:  neither  has  he  since  been  able  to  recover  it  from  among  the 
chronic  congestion  of  his  shelves. 


8  THE  ENFIELD  SCHOOL 

aspect  and  surroundings.  The  school-house  had  been 
origmally  built  for  a  rich  West  India  merchant,  in  the 
finest  style  of  early  Georgian  classic  architecture,  and 
stood  in  a  spacious  garden  at  the  lower  end  of  the  town. 
When  years  afterwards  the  site  was  used  for  a  railway 
station,  the  old  house  was  for  some  time  allowed  to  stand : 
but  later  it  was  taken  down,  and  the  central  part  of  the 
facade,  with  its  fine  proportions  and  rich  ornaments 
in  moulded  brick,  was  transported  to  the  South  Ken- 
sington (now  Victoria  and  Albert)  Museum,  and  is  still 
preserved  there  as  a  choice  example  of  the  style.  It 
is  evident  that  Mr  Clarke  was  a  kind  and  excellent 
schoolmaster,  much  above  the  standards  of  his  time, 
and  that  lads  with  any  bent  for  literature  or  scholarship 
had  their  fuU  chance  under  him.  Still  more  was  this 
the  case  when  his  son  Charles  Cowden  Clarke,  a  genial 
youth  with  an  ardent  and  trained  love  of  books  and 
music,  grew  old  enough  to  help  him  as  usher  in  the 
school-work.  The  brothers  John  and  George  Keats 
were  mere  children  when  they  were  put  under  Mr 
Clarke's  care,  John  not  much  over  and  George  a  good 
deal  under  eight  years  old,  both  still  dressed,  we  are 
told,  in  the  childish  frilled  suits  which  give  such  a  grace 
to'^oups  of  young  boys  in  the  drawings  of  Stothard  and 
his  contemporaries. 

Not  long  after  Keats  had  been  put  to  school  he  lost 
his  father,  whose  horse  fell  and  threw  him  in  the  City 
Road  as  he  rode  home  late  one  night  after  dining  at 
Southgate,  perhaps  on  his  way  home  from  the  Endfield 
School.  His  skuU  was  fractured:  he  was  picked  up 
unconscious  about  one  o'clock  and  died  at  eight  in 
the  morning.  This  was  on  the  16th  of  April,  1804. 
Within  twelve  months  his  widow  had  taken  a  second 
husband — one  William  Rawlings,  described  as  'of 
Moorgate  in  the  city  of  London,  stable-keeper,'  pre- 
sumably therefore  the  successor  of  her  first  husband 
in  the  management  of  her  father's  business.  (It  may 
be  noted  incidentally  that  Rawlings,  like  Jennings,  is 
a  name  common  in  Cornwall,  especially  in  and  about 


THE  EDMONTON  HOME  -    9 

the  parish  of  Madron).  This  marriage  must  have  turned 
out  unhappily,  for  it  was  soon  followed  by  a  separation, 
under  what  circumstances  or  through  whose  fault  we 
are  not  told.  In  the  correspondence  of  the  Keats 
brothers  after  they  were  grown  up  no  mention  is  ever 
made  of  their  stepfather,  of  whom  the  family  seem 
soon  to  have  lost  all  knowledge.  Mrs  Rawlings  went 
with  her  children  to  Hve  at  Edmonton,  in  the  house 
of  her  mother,  Mrs  Jennings,  who  was  just  about  this 
time  left  a  widow.  The  family  was  well  enough  pro- 
vided for,  Mr  Jennings  (who  died  March  8,  1805)  having 
left  a  fortune  of  over  £13,000,  of  which,  in  addition  to 
other  legacies,  he  bequeathed  a  capital  yielding  £200 
a  year  to  his  widow  absolutely;  one  yielding  £50  a 
year  to  his  daughter  Frances  Rawlings,  with  reversion 
to  her  Keats  children  after  her  death;  and  £1000  to 
be  separately  held  in  trust  for  the  said  children  and 
divided  among  them  on  the  coming  of  age  of  the 
youngest. 

Between  the  home,  then,  in  Church  Street,  Edmonton, 
and  the  neighbouring  Enfield  school,  where  the  two  elder 
brothers  were  in  due  time  joined  by  the  youngest,  the 
next  five  years  of  Keats^s  boyhood  (1806-1811)  were 
passed  in  sufficient  comfort  and  pleasantness.  He  did 
not  live  to  attain  the  years,  or  the  success,  of  men  who 
write  their  reminiscences;  and  almost  the  only  recol- 
lections he  has  left  of  his  own  early  days  refer  to  holiday 
times  in  his  grandmother's  house  at  Edmonton.  They 
are  conveyed  in  some  rimes  which  he  wrote  years  after- 
wards by  way  of  foolishness  to  amuse  his  young  sister, 
and  testify  to  a  partiality,  common  also  to  Httle  boys 
not  of  genius,  for  dabbling  by  the  brookside  and  keeping 
small  fishes  in  tubs, — 

There  was  a  naughty  boy  Of  the  Maid, 

And  a  naughty  boy  was  he  Nor  afraid 

He  kept  little  fishes  Of  his  Granny-good 

In  washing  tubs  three  He  often  would 

In  spite  Hurly  burly 

Of  the  might  Get  up  early 


10  THE  PYMMES  BROOK 

And  go  The  size 

By  hook  or  crook  Of  a  nice 

To  the  brook  Little  Baby's 

And  bring  home  Little  finger — 

Miller's  thumb,  O  he  made 

Tittlebat  'Twas  his  trade 

Not  over  fat,  Of  Fish  a  pretty  kettle 

Minnow  small  A  kettle — 

As  the  stal  A  kettle — 

Of  a  glove  Of  Fish  a  pretty  kettle 

Not  above  A  kettle  I 

In  a  later  letter  to  his  sister  he  makes  much  the  same 
confession  in  a  different  key,  when  he  bids  her  ask 
him  for  any  kind  of  present  she  fancies,  only  not 
for  live  stock  to  be  kept  in  captivity,  'though  I 
will  not  now  be  very  severe  on  it,  remembering  how 
fond  I  used  to  be  of  Goldfinches,  Tomtits,  Minnows, 
Mice,  Ticklebacks,  Dace,  Cock  salmons  and  all  the 
whole  tribe  of  the  Bushes  and  the  Brooks.'  Despite 
the  changes  which  have  overbuilt  and  squahdly  or 
sprucely  suburbanized  all  those  parts  of  Middlesex,  the 
Pymmes  brook  still  holds  its  course  across  half  the 
county,  is  still  bridged  by  the  main  street  of  Edmonton, 
and  runs  countrywise,  clear  and  open,  for  some  distance 
along  a  side  street  on  its  way  to  join  the  Lea.  Other 
memories  of  it,  and  of  his  childish  playings  and  musings 
beside  it,  find  expression  in  Keats's  poetry  where  he 
makes  the  shepherd-prince  Endymion  tell  his  sister 
Peona  how  one  of  his  love-sick  vagaries  has  been  to 
sit  on  a  stone  and  bubble  up  the  water  through  a  reed, — 

So  reaching  back  to  boy-hood:  make  me  ships 
Of  moulted  feathers,  touchwood,  alder  chips. 
With  leaves  stuck  in  them;  and  the  Neptune  be 
Of  their  petty  ocean. 

If  we  learn  little  of  Keats's  early  days  from  his  own 
lips,  we  have  sufficient  testimony  as  to  the  impression 
which  he  made  on  his  school  companions;  which  was  that 
of  a  fiery,  generous  little  fellow,  handsome  and  passionate, 
vehement  both  in  tears  and  laughter,  and  as  placable 
and  loveable  as  he  was  pugnacious.    But  beneath  this 


TESTIMONIES  OF  SCHOOLMATES  11 

bright  and  mettlesome  outside  there  lay  deep  in  his 
nature,  even  from  the  first,  a  strain  of  painful  sensibiHty 
making  him  subject  to  moods  of  unreasonable  suspicion 
and  self-tormenting  melancholy.  These  he  was  accus- 
tomed to  conceal  from  all  except  his  brothers,  to  whom 
he  was  attached  by  the  very  closest  of  fraternal  ties. 
George,  the  second  brother,  had  all  John's  spirit  of 
manhness  and  honour,  with  a  less  impulsive  disposition 
and  a  cooler  blood.  From  a  boy  he  was  the  bigger  and 
stronger  of  the  two:  and  at  school  foimd  himself 
continually  involved  in  fights  for,  and  not  unfrequently 
with,  his  small,  indomitably  fiery  senior.  Tom,  the 
youngest,  was  always  delicate,  and  an  object  of  pro- 
tecting care  as  well  as  the  warmest  affection  to  the 
other  two. 

Here  are  some  of  George  Keats's  recollections,  written 
after  the  death  of  his  elder  brother,  and  referring  partly 
to  their  school-days  and  partly  to  John's  character  after 
he  was  grown  up : 

I  loved  him  from  boyhood  even  when  he  wronged  me,  for 
the  goodness  of  his  heart  and  the  nobleness  of  his  spirit,  before 
we  left  school  we  quarrelled  often  and  fought  fiercely,  and  I 
can  safely  say  and  my  schoolfellows  will  bear  witness  that  John's 
temper  was  the  cause  of  all,  still  we  were  more  attached  than 
brothers  ever  are. 

From  the  time  we  were  boys  at  school,  where  we  loved,  jangled, 
and  fought  alternately,  until  we  separated  in  1818,  I  in  a  great 
measure  relieved  him  by  continual  sympathy,  explanation,  and 
inexhaustible  spirits  and  good  humour,  from  many  a  bitter  fit 
of  hypochondriasm.  He  avoided  teazing  any  one  with  his 
miseries  but  Tom  and  myself,  and  often  asked  our  forgiveness; 
venting  and  discussing  them  gave  him  relief. 

Let  US  turn  now  from  these  honest  and  warm  brotherly 
reminiscences  to  their  confirmation  in  the  words  of  two 
of  Keats's  school-friends;  and  first  in  those  of  his  junior 
Edward  Holmes,  afterwards  a  musical  critic  of  note 
and  author  of  a  well-known  Life  of  Mozart: — 

Keats  was  in  childhood  not  attached  to  books.  His  penchant 
was  for  fighting.  He  would  fight  any  one — morning,  noon,  and 
night,  his  brother  among  the  rest.     It  was  meat  and  drink  to 


12  EDWARD  HOLMES 

him.  Jennings  their  sailor  relation  was  always  in  the  thoughts 
of  the  brothers,  and  they  determined  to  keep  up  the  family 
reputation  for  courage;  George  in  a  passive  manner;  John 
and  Tom  more  fiercely.  The  favourites  of  John  were  few; 
after  they  were  known  to  fight  readily  he  seemed  to  prefer  them 
for  a  sort  of  grotesque  and  buffoon  humour.  I  recollect  at  this 
moment  his  delight  at  the  extraordinary  gesticulations  and 
pranks  of  a  boy  named  Wade  who  was  celebrated  for  this.  .  .  . 
He  was  a  boy  whom  any  one  from  his  extraordinary  vivacity 
and  personal  beauty  might  easily  fancy  would  become  great — 
but  rather  in  some  military  capacity  than  in  literature.  You 
will  remark  that  this  taste  came  out  rather  suddenly  and  un- 
expectedly. Some  books  of  his  I  remember  reading  were  Robinson 
Crusoe  and  something  about  Montezuma  and  the  Incas  of  Peru. 
He  must  have  read  Shakespeare  as  he  thought  that  *no  one 
would  care  to  read  Macbeth  alone  in  a  house  at  two  o'clock  in 
the  morning.'  This  seems  to  me  a  boyish  trait  of  the  poet. 
His  sensibility  was  as  remarkable  as  his  indifference  to  be  thought 
well  of  by  the  master  as  a  *good  boy'  and  to  his  tasks  in  general. 
.  .  .  He  was  in  every  way  the  creature  of  passion.  .  .  .  The  point 
to  be  chiefly  insisted  on  is  that  he  was  not  literary — his  love  of 
books  and  poetry  manifested  itself  chiefly  about  a  year  before  he 
left  school.  In  all  active  exercises  he  excelled.  The  generosity 
and  daring  of  his  character  with  the  extreme  beauty  and  ani- 
mation of  his  face  made  I  remember  an  impression  on  me — and 
being  some  years  his  junior  I  was  obliged  to  woo  his  friendship — 
in  which  I  succeeded,  but  not  till  I  had  fought  several  battles. 
This  violence  and  vehemence — this  pugnacity  and  generosity 
of  disposition — ^in  passions  of  tears  or  outrageous  fits  of  laughter 
— always  in  extremes — ^will  help  to  paint  Keats  in  his  boyhood. 
Associated  as  they  were  with  an  extraordinary  beauty  of  person 
and  expression,  these  qualities  captivated  the  boys,  and  no  one 
was  more  popular.^ 


Entirely  to  the  same  effect  is  the  account  of  Keats 
given  by  a  school  friend  seven  or  eight  years  older  than 
himself,  to  whose  appreciation  and  encouragement  the 
world  most  likely  owes  it  that  he  first  became  aware 
of  his  own  vocation  for  poetry.  This  was  the  afore- 
mentioned Charles  Gowden  Clarke,  the  son  of  the  head 
master,  who  towards  the  close  of  a  long  life,  during  which 
he  had  deserved  well  of  literature  and  of  his  generation 
in  more  ways  than  one,  wrote  retrospectively  of  Keats : — 

1  Houghton  MSS. 


CHARLES  COWDEN  CLARKE  13 

He  was  a  favourite  with  all.  Not  the  less  beloved  was  he 
for  having  a  highly  pugnacious  spirit,  which  when  roused  was 
one  of  the  most  picturesque  exhibitions — off  the  stage — I  ever 
saw.  One  of  the  transports  of  that  marvellous  actor,  Edmund 
Kean — ^whom,  by  the  way,  he  idolized — ^was  its  nearest  resem- 
blance; and  the  two  were  not  very  dissimilar  in  face  and  figure. 
Upon  one  occasion  when  an  usher,  on  account  of  some  impertinent 
behaviour,  had  boxed  his  brother  Tom's  ears,  John  rushed  up, 
put  himself  into  the  received  posture  of  offence,  and,  it  was 
said,  struck  the  usher — who  could,  so  to  say,  have  put  him  in 
his  pocket.  His  passion  at  times  was  almost  ungovernable; 
and  his  brother  George,  being  considerably  the  taller  and  stronger, 
used  frequently  to  hold  him  down  by  main  force,  laughing  when 
John  was  'in  one  of  his  moods,*  and  was  endeavouring  to  beat 
him.  It  was  all,  however,  a  wisp-of -straw  conflagration;  for 
he  had  an  intensely  tender  affection  for  his  brothers,  and  proved 
it  upon  the  most  trying  occasions.  He  was  not  merely  the 
favourite  of  all,  like  a  pet  prize-fighter,  for  his  terrier  courage; 
but  his  highmindedness,  his  utter  unconsciousness  of  a  mean 
motive,  his  placability,  his  generosity,  wrought  so  general  a 
feeling  in  his  behalf,  that  I  never  heard  a  word  of  disapproval 
from  any  one,  superior  or  equal,  who  had  known  him.^ 

The  same  excellent  witness  records  in  agreement  with 
the  last  that  in  his  earlier  school-days  Keats  showed  no 
particular  signs  of  an  intellectual  bent,  though  always 
orderly  and  methodical  in  what  he  did.  But  during 
his  last  few  terms,  that  is  in  his  fifteenth  and  sixteenth 
years,  he  suddenly  became  a  passionate  student  and  a 
very  glutton  of  books.  Let  us  turn  again  to  Cowden 
Clarke's  words: — 

My  father  was  in  the  habit,  at  each  half-year's  vacation,  of 
bestowing  prizes  upon  those  pupils  who  had  performed  the 
greatest  quantity  of  voluntary  work;  and  such  was  Keats's 
indefatigable  energy  for  the  last  two  or  three  successive  half- 
years  of  his  remaining  at  school,  that,  upon  each  occasion,  he 
took  the  first  prize  by  a  considerable  distance.  He  was  at  work 
before  the  first  school-hour  began,  and  that  was  at  seven  o'clock; 
almost  all  the  intervening  times  of  recreation  were  so  devoted; 
and  during  the  afternoon  holidays,  when  all  were  at  play,  he 
would  be  in  the  school — almost  the  only  one — at  his  Latin  or 
French  translation;    and  so  unconscious  and  regardless  was  he 

*  Charles  Cowden  Clarke,  Recollections  of  Writers,  1878. 


14  NEW  PASSION  FOR  READING 

of  the  consequences  of  so  close  and  persevering  an  application,  that 
he  never  would  have  taken  the  necessary  exercise  had  he  not  been 
sometimes  driven  out  for  the  purpose  by  one  of  the  masters.  .  .  . 

One  of  the  silver  medals  awarded  to  Keats  as  a  school 
prize  in  these  days  exists  in  confirmation  of  this  account 
and  was  lately  in  the  market.  Cowden  Clarke  con- 
tinues : — 

In  the  latter  part  of  the  time — perhaps  eighteen  months — 
that  he  remained  at  school,  he  occupied  the  hours  during  meals 
in  reading.  Thus,  his  whole  time  was  engrossed.  He  had  a 
tolerably  retentive  memory,  and  the  quantity  that  he  read  was 
surprising.  He  must  in  those  last  months  have  exhausted  the 
school  library,  which  consisted  principally  of  abridgements  of 
all  the  voyages  and  travels  of  any  note;  Mavor^s  collection,  also 
his  Universal  History;  Robertson's  histories  of  Scotland,  America, 
and  Charles  the  Fifth;  all  Miss  Edgeworth's  productions,  together 
with  many  other  books  equally  well  calculated  for  youth. 
The  books,  however,  that  were  his  constantly  recurrent  sources 
of  attraction  were  Tooke's  Pantheon,  Lempriere's  Classical 
Dictionary,  which  he  appeared  to  learny  and  Spence's  Polymetis. 
This  was  the  store  whence  he  acquired  his  intimacy  with  the 
Greek  mythology;  here  was  he  *  suckled  in  that  creed  outworn;' 
for  his  amount  of  classical  attainment  extended  no  farther  than 
the  ^neidy  with  which  epic,  indeed,  he  was  so  fascinated  that 
before  leaving  school  he  had  voluntarily  translated  in  writing 
a  considerable  portion.  .  .  . 

He  must  have  gone  through  all  the  better  publications  in 
the  school  library,  for  he  asked  me  to  lend  him  some  of  my 
own  books;  and,  in  my  'mind's  eye,'  I  now  see  him  at  supper 
(we  had  our  meals  in  the  schoolroom),  sitting  back  on  the  form, 
from  the  table,  holding  the  folio  volume  of  Burnet's  History  of 
his  Own  Time  between  himself  and  the  table,  eating  his  meal 
from  beyond  it.  This  work,  and  Leigh  Hunt's  Examiner — which 
my  father  took  in,  and  I  used  to  lend  to  Keats — no  doubt  laid 
the  foundation  of  his  love  of  civil  and  religious  liberty. 

In  the  midst  of  these  ardent  studies  of  Keats's  latter 
school-days  befell  the  death  of  his  mother,  who  had 
been  for  some  time  in  failing  health.  First  she  was 
disabled  by  chronic  rheumatism,  and  at  last  fell  into  a 
rapid  consumption,  which  carried  her  off  at  the  age  of 
thirty-five  in  February  1810.  We  are  told  with  what 
devotion  her   eldest   boy   attended  her   sick-bed, — 'he 


LEFT  AN  ORPHAN  15 

sat  up  whole  nights  with  her  in  a  great  chair,  would 
suffer  nobody  to  give  her  medicine,  or  even  cook  her 
food,  but  himself,  and  read  novels  to  her  in  her  intervals 
of  ease,' — and  how  bitterly  he  mourned  for  her  when 
she  was  gone, — ^he  gave  way  to  such  impassioned  and 
prolonged  grief  (hiding  himself  in  a  nook  imder  the 
master's  desk)  as  awakened  the  liveliest  pity  and  sym- 
pathy in  all  who  saw  him.' 

From  her,  no  doubt,  came  that  predisposition  to  con- 
sumption which  showed  itself  in  her  youngest  son  from 
adolescence  and  carried  him  off  at  nineteen,  and  with 
the  help  of  ill  luck,  over-exertion,  and  distress  of  mind, 
wrecked  also  before  twenty-five  the  robust-seeming 
frame  and  constitution  of  her  eldest,  the  poet.  Were 
the  accounts  of  her  character  less  ambiguous,  or  were 
the  strands  of  human  heredity  less  inveterately  entangled 
than  they  are,  it  would  be  tempting,  when  we  consider 
the  deep  duality  of  Keats's  nature,  the  trenchant  con- 
trast between  the  two  selves  that  were  in  him,  to  trace 
to  the  mother  the  seeds  of  one  of  those  selves,  the 
feverishly  over-sensitive  and  morbidly  passionate  one, 
and  to  his  father  the  seeds  of  the  other,  the  self  that 
was  all  manly  good  sense  and  good  feeHng  and  undis- 
turbed clear  vision  and  judgment.  In  the  sequel  we 
shall  see  this  fine  virile  self  in  Keats  continually  and 
consciously  battling  against  the  other,  trying  to  hold 
it  down,  and  succeeding  almost  always  in  keeping  control 
over  his  ways  and  deaHngs  with  his  fellow-men,  though 
not  over  the  inward  frettiugs  of  his  spirit. 

In  the  July  following  her  daughter's  death,  Mrs 
Jennings,  being  desirous  to  make  the  best  provision  she 
could  for  her  orphan  grand-children,  4n  consideration 
of  the  natural  love  and  affection  which  she  had  for  them,' 
executed  a  deed  putting  them  under  the  care  of  two 
guardians,  to  whom  she  made  over,  to  be  held  in  trust 
for  their  benefit  from  the  date  of  the  instrument,  the 
chief  part  of  the  property  which  she  derived  from  her 
late  husband  under  his  will.^    The  guardians  were  Mr 

*  Bawlings  v.  Jennings, 


.16  APPRENTICED  TO  A  SURGEON 

Rowland  Sandell,  merchant,  who  presently  renounced 
the  trust,  and  the  aforesaid  Mr  Richard  Abbey,  tea- 
dealer.  Mrs  Jennings  survived  the  execution  of  this 
deed  more  than  four  years,^  but  Mr  Abbey  seems  at 
once  to  have  taken  up  all  the  responsibiHties  of  the 
trust.  Under  his  authority  John  Keats  was  withdrawn 
from  school  at  the  end  of  the  summer  term,  1811, 
when  he  was  some  months  short  of  sixteen,  and  made 
to  put  on  harness  for  the  practical  work  of  life.  With 
no  opposition,  so  far  as  we  learn,  on  his  own  part,  he 
was  bound  apprentice  to  a  Mr  Thomas  Hammond,  a 
surgeon  and  apothecary  of  good  repute  at  Edmonton, 
for  the  customary  term  of  five  years.^ 

The  years  between  the  sixteenth  and  twentieth  of  his 
age  are  the  most  critical  of  a  young  man's  life,  and  in 
these  years,  during  which  our  other  chief  London-born 
poets,  Spenser,  Milton,  Gray,  were  profiting  by  the 
discipline  of  Cambridge  and  the  Muses,  Keats  had  no 
better  or  more  helpful  regular  training  than  that  of  an 
ordinary  apprentice,  apparently  one  of  several,  in  a 
suburban  surgery.    But  he  had  the  one  advantage,  to 

1  She  was  buried  at  St  Stephen's,  Cohnan  Street,  Deer.  19, 1814,  aged  78. 

2  Mistakes  have  crept  into  the  received  statements  (my  own  included) 
as  to  the  dates  when  Keats's  apprenticeship  began  and  ended.  The 
witnesses  on  whom  we  have  chiefly  to  depend  wrote  from  thirty  to  fifty 
years  after  the  events  they  were  trying  to  recall,  and  some  of  them,  Cowden 
Clarke  especially,  had  avowedly  no  memory  for  dates.  The  accepted 
date  of  Keats's  leaving  school  and  going  as  apprentice  to  Mr  Hammond 
at  Edmonton  has  hitherto  been  the  autumn  of  1810,  the  end  of  his  fifteenth 
year.  It  should  have  been  the  late  summer  of  181 1,  well  on  in  his  sixteenth, 
as  is  proved  by  the  discovery  of  a  copy  of  Bonnycastle's  Astronomy  given 
him  as  a  prize  at  the  end  of  the  midsummer  term  that  year  (see  Bulletin  of 
the  KeatsShelley  Memorial,  Rome,  1913,  p.  23).  On  the  other  hand 
we  have  material  evidence  of  his  having  left  by  the  following  year,  in 
the  shape  of  ah  Ovid  presented  to  him  from  the  school  and  inscribed 
with  a  fine  writing-master's  flourish,  'John  Keats,  emer:  1812;'  emer, 
added  in  a  fainter  ink,  is  of  course  for  emeritus,  a  boy  who  has  left  school. 
This  book  is  in  the  Dilke  collection  of  Keats  relics  at  Hampstead,  and  the 
inscription  has  been  supposed  to  be  Keats's  own,  which  it  manifestly  is 
not.  Another  school-book  of  Keats's,  of  five  years'  earUer  date,  has  lately 
been  presented  to  the  same  collection:  this  is  the  French-English  grammar 
of  Duverger, — inscribed  in  much  the  same  calligraphy  with  his  name  and 
the  date  1807.  He  must  have  studied  it  to  some  purpose,  if  we  may  judge 
by  the  good  reading  knowledge  of  French  which  he  clearly  possessed  when 
he  was  grown  up. 


RELATIONS  WITH  HIS  MASTER  17 

him  inestimable,  of  proximity  to  his  old  school,  which 
meant  free  access  to  the  school  Hbrary  and  continued 
encouragement  and  advice  in  reading  from  his  affec- 
tionate senior,  the  headmaster's  son.  The  fact  that 
it  was  only  two  miles'  walk  from  Edmonton  to  Enfield 
helped  much,  says  Cowden  Clarke,  to  reconcile  him  to 
his  new  way  of  life,  and  his  duties  at  the  surgery  were 
not  onerous.  As  laid  down  in  the  ordinary  indentures 
of  apprenticeship  in  those  times,  they  were  indeed 
chiefly  negative,  the  apprentice  binding  himself  'not 
to  haunt  taverns  or  playhouses,  not  to  play  at  dice  or 
cards,  nor  absent  himself  from  his  said  master's  service 
day  or  night  unlawfully,  but  in  all  things  as  a  faithful 
apprentice  he  shall  behave  himself  towards  the  said 
master  and  all  his  during  the  said  term. ' 

Keats  himself,  it  is  recorded,  did  not  love  talking  of 
his  apprentice  days,  and  has  left  no  siagle  written 
reference  to  them  except  the  much-quoted  phrase  in 
a  letter  of  1819,  in  which,  speaking  of  the  continual 
processes  of  change  in  the  human  tissues,  he  says, 
'this  is  not  the  same  hand  which  seven  years  ago 
clenched  itself  at  Hammond.'  It  was  natural  that  the 
same  fiery  temper  which  made  him  as  a  small  boy 
square  up  against  an  usher  on  behalf  of  his  brother, — 
an  offence  which  the  headmaster,  according  to  his  son 
Cowden  Clarke,  'felt  he  could  not  severely  punish,' — 
it  was  natural  that  this  same  temper  should  on  occasion 
flame  out  against  his  employer  the  surgeon.  If  Keats's 
words  are  to  be  taken  literally,  this  happened  in  the 
second  year  of  his  apprenticeship.  ,  Probably  it  was  but 
the  affair  of  a  moment:  there  is  no  evidence  of  any 
habitual  disagreement  or  final  breach  between  them, 
and  Keats  was  able  to  put  in  the  necessary  testimonial 
from  Mr  Hammond  when  he  presented  himself  in  due 
course  for  examination  before  the  Court  of  Apothecaries. 
A  fellow-apprentice  in  after  years  remembered  him  as 
'an  idle  loafing  fellow,  always  writing  poetry.'  This, 
seeing  that  he  did  not  begin  to  write  till  he  was  near 
eighteen,  must  refer  to  the  last  two  years  of  his  appren- 


18  READINGS  IN  THE  POETS 

ticeship  and  probably  represents  an  unlettered  view  of 
his  way  of  emplo3dng  his  leisure,  rather  (judging  by  his 
general  character)  than  any  slackness  in  the  performance 
of  actual  duty.  One  of  the  very  few  glimpses  we  have 
of  him  from  outside  is  from  Robert  Hengist  Home 
('Orion'  Home),  another  alumnus  of  the  Enfield  school 
who  lived  to  make  his  mark  in  literature.  Home 
remembered  Mr  Hammond  driving  on  a  professional 
visit  to  the  school  one  winter  day  and  leaving  Keats  to 
take  care  of  the  gig.  While  Keats  sat  in  a  brown  study 
holding  the  reins,  yoimg  Home,  remembering  his  school 
reputation  as  a  boxer,  in  bravado  threw  a  snowball  at 
him  and  hit,  but  made  off  into  safety  before  Keats  could 
get  at  him  to  inflict  punishment.  The  story  suggests  a 
picture  to  the  eye  but  tells  nothing  to  the  mind. 

Our  only  real  witness  for  this  time  of  Keats's  life  is 
Cowden  Clarke.  He  tells  us  how  the  lad's  newly 
awakened  passion  for  the  pleasures  of  literatiu'e  and 
the  imagination  was  not  to  be  stifled,  and  how  at  Ed- 
monton he  plunged  back  into  his  school  occupations  of 
reading  and  translating  whenever  he  could  spare  the 
time.  He  finished  at  this  time  his  prose  version  of 
the  JEneid,  and  on  free  afternoons  and  evenings,  five 
or  six  times  a  month  or  oftener,  was  in  the  habit  of 
walking  over  to  Enfield, — ^by  that  field  path  where 
Lamb  found  the  stiles  so  many  and  so  hard  to  tackle, — 
to  see  his  friend  Cowden  Clarke  and  bring  away  or 
return  borrowed  books.  Young  Clarke  was  an  ardent 
liberal  and  disciple  of  Leigh  Hunt  both  in  poHtical 
opinions  and  literary  taste.  In  summer  weather  he 
and  Keats  would  sit  in  a  shady  arbour  in  the  old  school 
garden,  the  elder  reading  poetry  to  the  younger,  and 
enjoying  his  looks  and  exclamations  of  delight.  From 
the  nature  of  Keats's  imitative  first  flights  in  verse,  it 
is  clear  that  though  he  hated  the  whole  'Augustan' 
and  post-Augustan  tribe  of  social  and  moral  essayists 
in  verse,  and  Pope,  their  illustrious  master,  most  of 
all,  yet  his  mind  and  ear  had  become  familiar,  in  the 
course    of   his    school    and    after-school    reading,    with 


THE  FAERIE  QUEENE  19 

Thomson,  Collins,  Gray,  and  all  the  more  romantically 
minded  poets  of  the  middle  and  later  eighteenth  century. 
But  the  essential  service  Clarke  did  him  was  in  pressing 
upon  his  attention  the  poetry  of  the  great  Elizabethan 
and  Jacobean  age,  from  The  Shepheard's  Calendar  do\\Ti 
to  Camus  and  LyddaSj — 'our  older  and  nobler  poetry,' 
as  a  few  had  always  held  it  to  be  even  through  the  Age 
of  Reason  and  the  reign  of  Pope  and  his  followers,  and 
as  it  was  now  loudly  proclaimed  to  be  by  all  the  inno- 
vating critics,  with  Leigh  Hunt  and  HazHtt  among  the 
foremost. 

On  a  momentous  day  for  Keats,  Cowden  Clarke 
introduced  him  for  the  first  time  to  Spenser,  reading 
him  the  Epithalamion  in  the  afternoon  and  at  his  own 
eager  request  lending  him  the  Faerie  Queene  to  take 
away  the  same  evening.  With  Spenser's  later  imi- 
tators, playful  or  serious,  as  Shenstone  and  Thomson, 
Beattie  and  the  more  recent  Mrs  Tighe,  Keats,  we 
know,  was  already  familiar;  indeed  he  owned  later  to 
a  passing  phase  of  boyish  dehght  in  Seattle's  Minstrel 
and  Tighe's  languorously  romantic  Psyche.  But  now  he 
found  himself  taken  to  the  fountain  head,  and  was 
enraptured.  It  has  been  said,  and  truly,  that  no  one 
who  has  not  had  the  good  fortune  to  be  attracted  to 
the  Faerie  Queene  in  boyhood  can  ever  quite  whole- 
heartedly and  to  the  full  enjoy  it.  The  maturer 
student,  appreciate  as  he  may  its  innumerable  beauties 
and  noble  ethical  temper,  can  hardly  fail  to  be  critically 
conscious  also  of  its  arbitrary  forms  of  rime  and  language, 
and  sated  by  its  melodious  redundance:  he  will  per- 
ceive its  faults  now  of  scholastic  pedantry  and  now 
of  flagging  inspiration,  the  perplexity  and  discon- 
tinuousness  of  the  allegory,  and  the  absence  of  real 
and  breathing  humanity  amidst  all  that  luxuriance  of 
symbolic  and  decorative  invention,  and  prodigality  of 
romantic  incident  and  detail.  It  is  otherwise  with  the 
greedy  and  indiscriminate  imaginative  appetite  of 
boyhood.  I  speak  as  one  of  the  fortunate  who  know 
by  experience  that  for  a  boy  there  is  no  poetical  revela- 


20  THE  SPENSER  FEVER 

tion  like  the  Faerie  Queene,  no  pleasure  equal  to  the 
pleasure  of  being  rapt  for  the  first  time  along  that 
ever-buoyant  stream  of  verse,  by  those  rivers  and  forests 
of  enchantment,  glades  and  wildernesses  alive  with 
glancing  figures  of  knight  and  lady,  oppressor  and 
champion,  mage  and  Saracen, — with  masque  and  combat, 
pursuit  and  rescue,  the  chivalrous  shapes  and  hazards 
of  the  woodland,  and  beauty  triumphant  or  in  distress. 
Through  the  new  world  thus  opened  to  him  Keats  went 
ranging  with  delight:  ^ramping'  is  Cowden  Clarke's 
word:  he  shewed  moreover  his  own  instinct  for  the 
poetical  art  by  fastening  with  critical  enthusiasm  on 
epithets  of  special  felicity  or  power.  For  instance, 
says  his  friend,  'he  hoisted  himseK  up,  and  looked 
burly  and  dominant,  as  he  said,  "What  an  image  that 
is — sea-shouldering  whales  V^ ' 

Spenser  has  been  often  proved  not  only  a  great 
awakener  of  the  love  of  poetry  in  youth,  but  a  great 
fertiHzer  of  the  germs  of  original  poetical  power 
where  they  exist;  and  Charles  Brown,  Keats's  most 
intimate  companion  during  the  two  last  years  of  his 
life,  states  positively  that  it  was  to  the  inspiration  of 
the  Faerie  Queene  that  his  first  notion  of  attempting 
to  write  was  due.  'Though  born  to  be  a  poet,  he  was 
ignorant  of  his  birthright  until  he  had  completed  his 
eighteenth  year.  It  was  the  Faerie  Queene  that  awakened 
his  genius.  In  Spenser's  fairy-land  he  was  enchanted, 
breathed  in  a  new  world,  and  became  another  being; 
till  enamoured  of  the  stanza,  he  attempted  to  imitate 
it,  and  succeeded.  This  account  of  the  sudden  develop- 
ment of  his  poetic  powers  I  first  received  from  his  brothers 
and  afterwards  from  himself.  This,  his  earliest  attempt, 
the  Imitation  of  Spenser,  is  in  his  first  volume  of  poems, 
and  it  is  peculiarly  interesting  to  those  acquainted  with 
his  history.'  Cowden  Clarke  places  the  attempt  two 
years  earlier,  but  his  memory  for  dates  was,  as  he  owns, 
the  vaguest.  We  may  fairly  take  Brown  to  be  on 
this  point  the  better  informed  of  the  two,  and  may 
assume  that  it  was  some  time  in  the  second  year  after 


OTHER  POETIC  INFLUENCES  21 

he  left  school  that  the  Spenser  fever  took  hold  on  Keats, 
and  with  it  the  longing  to  be  himself  a  poet.  But  it 
was  not  with  Spenser  alone,  it  was  with  other  allegoric 
and  narrative  poets  as  well,  his  followers  or  contem- 
poraries, that  Keats  was  in  these  days  gaining  acquain- 
tance. Not  quite  in  his  earliest,  but  still  in  his  very 
early,  attempts,  we  find  clear  traces  of  familiarity  with 
the  work  both  of  William  Browne  of  Tavistock  and  of 
Michael  Drayton,  and  we  can  conceive  how  in  that 
charming  ingenuous  retrospect  of  Drayton's  on  his 
boyish  vocation  to  poetry,  addressed  to  his  friend 
Henry  Reynolds,  Keats  will  have  smiled  to  find  an 
utterance  of  the  same  passion  that  had  just  awakened 
in  his  own  not  very  much  maturer  self. 

Let  it  be  remembered  moreover  that  the  years  of 
Keats's  school  days  and  apprenticeship  were  also  those 
of  the  richest  and  most  stimulating  outburst  of  the  new 
poetry  in  England.  To  name  only  their  chief  products, — 
the  Lyrical  Ballads  of  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth  had 
come  while  he  was  only  a  child:  during  his  school 
days  had  appeared  Wordsworth's  still  richer  and  not 
less  challenging  volumes  of  1807,  and  the  succession  of 
Scott's  romantic  lays  (but  these  last,  in  spite  of  their 
enormous  public  success,  it  was  in  circles  influenced  by 
Leigh  Hunt  not  much  the  fashion  to  admire):  during 
his  apprentice  years  at  Edmonton,  the  two  first 
cantos  of  Byron's  Childe  Harold  and  the  still  more 
overwhelmingly  successful  series  of  his  Eastern  tales: 
and  finally  Wordsworth's  Excursion,  with  which  almost 
from  the  first  Keats  was  profoundly  impressed.  But 
it  was  not,  of  course,  only  by  reading  poetry  that 
he  was  learning  to  be  a  poet.  Nature  was  quite  as 
much  his  teacher  as  books;  and  the  nature  within 
easy  reach  of  him,  tame  indeed  and  unimpressive  in 
comparison  with  Wordsworth's  lakes  and  mountains, 
had  quite  enough  of  vital  English  beauty  to  afford  fair 
seed-time  to  his  soul.  Across  the  levels  of  the  Lea 
valley,  not  then  disfigured  as  they  are  now  by  factories 
and  reservoir  works  and  the  squalor  of  sprawling  suburbs, 


22  INFLUENCES  OF  NATURE 

rose  the  softly  shagged  undulations  of  Epping  forest,  a 
region  which  no  amount  of  Cockney  frequentation  or 
prosaic  vicinity  can  ever  quite  strip  of  its  primitive 
romance.  Westward  over  Hornsey  to  the  Highgate 
and  Hampstead  heights,  north-westward  through  South- 
gate  towards  the  Barnets,  and  thence  in  a  sweep  by  the 
remains  of  Enfield  Chase,  was  a  rich  tract  of  typically 
EngHsh  country,  a  country  of  winding  elm-shadowed 
lanes,  of  bosky  hedge  and  thicket  and  undulating 
pasture-land  charmingly  diversified  with  parks  and 
pleasaunces.  Nearly  such  I  can  myself  remember  it  some 
sixty  years  ago,  and  even  now,  off  the  tram-frequented 
highways  and  between  the  devastating  encroachments 
of  bricks  and  mortar,  forlorn  patches  of  its  ancient 
pastoral  self  are  still  to  be  found  lurking. 

It  was  in  his  rambles  afield  in  these  directions  and  in 
his  habitual  afternoon  and  evening  strolls  to  Enfield 
and  back,  that  a  delighted  sense  of  the  myriad  activities 
of  nature's  life  in  wood  and  field  and  brook  and  croft 
and  hedgerow  began  to  possess  Keats's  mind,  and  to 
blend  with  the  beautiful  images  that  already  peopled 
it  from  his  readings  in  Greek  mythology,  and  to  be 
enhanced  into  a  strange  supernatural  thrill  by  the 
recurring  magic  of  moonlight.  It  is  only  in  adolescence 
that  such  delights  can  be  drunk  in,  not  with  conscious 
study  and  observation  but  passively  and  half  unaware 
through  all  the  pores  of  being,  and  no  youth  ever  drank 
them  in  more  deeply  than  Keats.  Not  till  later  came 
for  him,  or  comes  for  any  man,  the  time  when  the 
images  so  absorbed,  and  the  emotions  and  sympathies 
so  awakened,  define  and  develop  themselves  in  con- 
sciousness and  discover  with  effort  and  practice  the 
secret  of  rightly  expressing  themselves  in  words. 

After  Keats,  imder  the  stimulus  of  Spenser,  had  taken 
his  first  plunge  into  verse,  he  went  on  writing  occasional 
sonnets  and  other  pieces:  secretly  and  shyly  at  first 
like  all  other  young  poets:  at  least  it  was  not  until 
some  two  years  later,  in  the  spring  of  1815,  that  he 
showed  anything  that  he  had  written  to  his  friend  and 


EARLY  ATTEMPTS  IN  VERSE  23 

confidant  Cowden  Clarke.  This  was  a  sonnet  on  the 
release  of  Leigh  Hunt  after  serving  a  two  years'  sen- 
tence of  imprisonment  for  a  poHtical  offence.  Clarke 
relates  how  he  was  walking  in  to  London  from  Enfield 
to  call  on  and  congratulate  the  ex-prisoner,  whom  he 
not  only  revered  as  a  martyr  in  the  cause  of  Hberty  but 
knew  and  admired  personally,  when  Keats  met  him 
and  tm^ned  back  to  accompany  him  part  of  the  way. 
'At  the  last  field-gate,  when  taking  leave,  he  gave  me 
the  sonnet  entitled  Written  on  the  day  that  Mr  Leigh 
Hunt  left  prison.  This  I  feel  to  be  the  first  proof  I  had 
received  of  his  having  committed  himself  in  verse;  and 
how  clearly  do  I  remember  the  conscious  look  and 
hesitation  with  which  he  offered  it!  There  are  some 
momentary  glances  by  beloved  friends  that  fade  only 
with  life.'  About  a  score  of  the  pieces  which  Keats 
had  written  and  kept  secret  during  the  preceding  two 
years  are  presei'ved,  and  like  the  work  of  almost  all 
beginners  are  quite  imitative  and  conventional,  failing 
to  express  anything  original  or  personal  to  himself. 
They  include  the  aforesaid  Spenserian  stanzas,  which 
in  fact  echo  the  cadences  of  Thomson's  Castle  of  Indolence 
much  more  than  those  of  Spenser  himself;  an  ode  to 
Hope,  quite  in  the  square-toed  manner  of  eighteenth- 
century  didactic  verse,  and  another  to  Apollo,  in  which 
style  and  expression  owe  everything  to  Gray;  a  set 
of  octosyllabics  recording,  this  time  with  some  touch 
of  freshness,  a  momentary  impression  of  a  woman's 
beauty  received  one  night  at  Vauxhall,  and  so  intense 
that  it  continued  to  haunt  his  memory  for  years;  two 
sets  of  verses  addressed  in  a  vein  of  polite  parlour 
compliment  to  lady  friends  at  the  seaside;  and  several 
quite  feeble  sonnets  in  the  Wordsworthian  form,  among 
them  one  on  the  peace  of  Paris  in  1814,  one  on  Chat- 
terton  and  one  on  Byron. 

Of  Keats's  outward  ways  and  doings  during  these 
days  when  he  was  growing  to  manhood  we  know  nothing 
directly  except  from  Cowden  Clarke,  and  can  only 
gather  a  little  more  by  inference.     It  is  clear  that  he 


24  EARLY  SYMPATHIZERS 

enjoyed  a  certain  amount  of  liberty  and  holiday,  more, 
perhaps,  than  would  have  fallen  to  the  lot  of  a  more 
zealous  apprentice,  and  that  he  spent  part  of  his  free 
time  in  London  in  the  society  of  his  brother  George, 
at  this  time  a  clerk  in  Mr  Abbey's  counting-house, 
and  of  friends  to  whom  George  made  him  known. 
Among  these  were  the  family  of  an  officer  of  marines 
named  WyHe,  to  whose  charming  daughter,  Georgiana, 
George  Keats  a  little  later  became  engaged,  and  another 
family  of  prosperous  tradespeople  named  Mathew. 
Here  too  there  were  daughters,  Caroline  and  Ann,  who 
made  themselves  pleasant  to  the  Keats  brothers,  and 
to  whom  were  addressed  the  pair  of  complimentary 
jingles  already  mentioned.  One  of  the  sisters,  asked 
in  later  life  for  her  recollections  of  the  time,  replied 
in  a  weariful  strain  of  evangelical  penitence  for  the 
frivolities  of  those  days,  and  foimd  nothing  more  to 
the  purpose  to  say  of  Keats  than  this: — 'I  cannot 
go  further  than  say  I  always  thought  he  had  a 
very  beautiful  countenance  and  was  very  warm  and 
enthusiastic  in  his  character.  He  wrote  a  great  deal 
of  poetry  at  our  house  but  I  do  not  recollect  whether  I 
ever  had  any  of  it,  I  certainly  have  none  now;  Ann 
had  many  pieces  of  his.'  A  cousin  of  this  family,  one 
George  Felt  on  Mathew,  was  a  youth  of  sensibility  aad 
poetical  leanings,  and  became  for  a  time  an  intimate 
friend  of  Keats,  and  next  to  his  brothers  and  Cowden 
Clarke  the  closest  confidant  of  his  studies  and  ambitions. 
Their  ilitimacy  began  in  the  Edmonton  days  and  lasted 
through  the  earlier  months  of  his  student  life  in  London. 
Looking  back  upon  their  relations  after  some  thirty 
years,  Mr  Felton  Mathew,  then  a  supernumerary  official 
of  the  Poor  Law  Board,  struggling  meekly  under  the 
combined  strain  of  a  precarious  income,  a  family  of 
twelve  children,  and  a  turn  for  the  interpretation  of 
prophecy,  wrote  as  follows: — 

Keats  and  I  though  about  the  same  age,  and  both  inclined 
to  literatiu'e,  were  in  many  respects  as  different  as  two  individuals 
could  be.    He  enjoyed  good  heahh — a  fine  flow  of  animal  spirits 


GEORGE  FELTON  MATHEW  25 

— ^was  fond  of  company — could  amuse  himself  admirably  with 
the  frivolities  of  life — and  had  great  confidence  in  himself.  I, 
on  the  other  hand  was  languid  and  melancholy — fond  of  repose 
— thoughtful  beyond  my  years — and  diffident  to  the  last  degree. 
But  I  always  delighted  in  administering  to  the  happiness  of 
others:  and  being  one  of  a  large  family,  it  pleased  me  much  to 
see  him  and  his  brother  George  enjoy  themselves  so  much  at 
our  little  domestic  concerts  and  dances.  .  .  .  He  was  of  the 
sceptical  and  republican  school.  An  advocate  for  the  innova- 
tions which  were  making  progress  in  his  time.  A  faultfinder 
with  everything  established.  I,  on  the  contrary,  hated  contro- 
versy and  dispute — dreaded  discord  and  disorder — loved  the 
institutions  of  my  country.  .  .  .  But  I  respected  Keats's  opinions, 
because  they  were  sincere — ^refrained  from  subjects  on  which 
we  diifered,  and  only  asked  him  to  concede  with  me  the  imper- 
fection of  human  knowledge,  and  the  fallibility  of  human  judg- 
ment: while  he,  on  his  part,  would  often  express  regret  on 
finding  that  he  had  given  pain  or  annoyance  by  opposing  with 
ridicule  or  asperity  the  opinions  of  others. 

Of  Keats's  physical  appearance  and  poetical  preferences 
the  same  witness  writes  further: — 

A  painter  or  a  sculptor  might  have  taken  him  for  a  study 
after  the  Greek  masters,  and  have  given  him  *a  station  like  the 
herald  Merciu-y,  new  lighted  on  some  heaven-kissing  hill.*  His 
eye  admired  more  the  external  decorations  than  felt  the  deep 
emotions  of  the  Muse.  He  delighted  in  leading  you  through 
the  mazes  of  elaborate  description,  but  was  less  conscious  of 
the  sublime  and  the  pathetic.  He  used  to  spend  many  evenings 
in  reading  to  me,  but  I  never  observed  the  tears  in  his  eyes  nor 
the  broken  voice  which  are  indicative  of  extreme  sensibility. 
These  indeed  were  not  the  parts  of  poetry  which  he  took  pleasure 
in  pointing  out. 

This  last,  it  should  be  noted,  seems  in  pretty  direct 
contradiction  with  one  of  Cowden  Clarke's  liveliest 
recollections  as  follows: — 'It  was  a  treat  to  see  as 
well  as  hear  him  read  a  pathetic  passage.  Once  when 
reading  Cymbeline  aloud,  I  saw  his  eyes  fill  with  tears, 
and  his  voice  faltered  when  he  came  to  the  departure 
of  Posthumus,  and  Imogen  saying  she  would  have 
watched  him — 

Till  the  diminution 
Of  space  had  pointed  him  sharp  as  my  needle; 


26  MOVE  TO  LONDON 

Nay  followed  him  till  he  had  melted  from 
The  smallness  of  a  gnat  to  air;  and  then 
Have  turned  mine  eye  and  wept/ 

Early  in  the  autumn  of  1815,  a  few  weeks  before  his 
twentieth  birthday,  Keats  left  the  service  of  Mr  Hammond, 
his  indentures  having  apparently  been  cancelled  by 
consent,  and  went  to  live  in  London  as  a  student  at 
the  hospitals,  then  for  teaching  purposes  united,  of 
Guy's  and  St  Thomas's.  What  befell  him  during  the 
eighteen  months  that  followed,  and  how  his  career  as  a 
student  came  to  an  end,  will  be  told  in  the  next  two 
chapters.^ 

1  Surmise,  partly  founded  on  the  vague  recollections  of  former  fellow 
students,  has  hitherto  dated  this  step  a  year  earlier,  in  the  autumn  of 
1814.  But  the  publication  of  the  documents  relating  to  Keats  from 
the  books  of  the  hospital  show  that  this  is  an  error.  He  was  not  entered 
as  a  student  at  Guy's  till  October  1,  1815.  If  he  had  moved  to  London, 
as  has  been  supposed,  a  year  earUer,  he  would  have  had  nothing  to  do 
there,  nor  is  it  the  least  hkely  that  his  guardian  would  have  permitted 
such  removal.  That  he  came  straight  from  Mr  Hammond's  to  Guy's, 
without  any  intermediate  period  of  study  elsewhere,  is  certain  both  from 
a  note  to  that  effect  against  the  entry  of  his  name  in  the  hospital  books, 
and  from  the  exphcit  statement  of  his  fellow-student  and  sometime  house- 
mate, Mr  Henry  Stephens.  It  results  that  the  period  of  his  Ufe  as  hospital 
student  in  a  succession  of  London  lodgings  must  be  cut  down  from  the 
supposed  two  years  and  a  half,  October  1814-April  1817,  to  one  year  and 
a  half,  Oct.  1815-April  1817.  There  is  no  difficulty  about  this,  and  I 
think  that  both  as  to  his  leaving  school  and  his  going  to  London  the  facts 
and  dates  set  forth  in  the  present  chapter  may  be  taken  as  well  established. 


CHAPTER  II 

OCTOBER  1815-MARCH  1817 :   HOSPITAL  STUDIES :    POETICAL 
AMBITIONS:    LEIGH  HUNT 

Hospital  days:  summary — Aptitudes  and  ambitions — Teachers — Testi- 
mony of  Henry  Stephens — Pride  and  other  characteristics — Evidences 
of  a  wandering  mind — Services  of  Cowden  Clarke — Introduction  to 
Leigh  Hunt — Summer  walks  at  Hampstead — Holiday  epistles  from 
Margate — Return  to  London — First  reading  of  Chapman's  Homer — 
Date  of  the  Chapman  sonnet — Intimacy  with  Leigh  Hunt — The 
Examiner:  Hunt's  imprisonment — His  visitors  in  captivity — His 
occupations — The  Feast  of  the  poets — Hunt's  personahty  and  charm 
— His  ideas  of  poetical  reform — The  story  of  Rimini — Its  popularity 
— Dante  and  namby-pamby — Hunt's  life  at  Hampstead — ^Hunt  and 
Keats  compared — ^Keats  at  Hunt's  cottage — Prints  in  the  Ubrary — The 
intercoronation  scene — Sonnets  of  Hunt  to  Keats — Sonnets  of  Keats 
to  Hunt — Keats's  penitence. 

The  external  and  technical  facts  of  Keats's  life  as  a 
medical  student  are  these.  His  name,  as  we  have  said, 
was  entered  at  Guy's  as  a  six  months'  student  (surgeon's 
pupil)  on  October  1,  1815,  a  month  before  his  twentieth 
birthday.  Four  weeks  later  he  was  appointed  dresser 
to  one  of  the  hospital  surgeons,  Mr  Lucas.  At  the 
close  of  his  first  six  months'  term,  March  3,  1816,  he 
entered  for  a  further  term  of  twelve  months.  On  July 
25,  1816,  he  presented  himself  for  examination  before 
the  Court  of  Apothecaries  and  obtained  their  licence  to 
practise.  He  continued  to  attend  lectures  and  live  the 
regular  life  of  a  student;  but  early  in  the  spring  of  1817, 
being  now  of  age  and  on  the  eve  of  publishing  his  first 
volume  of  verse,  he  determined  to  abandon  the  pursuit 

27 


28  HOSPITAL  DAYS:    SUMMARY 

of  medicine  for  that  of  poetry,  declared  his  intention  to 
his  guardian,  and  ceased  attending  the  hospitals  without 
seeking  or  receiving  the  usual  certificate  of  proficiency. 
For  the  first  two  or  three  months  of  this  period,  from 
the  beginning  of  October  1815  till  about  the  new  year 
of  1816,  Keats  lodged  alone  at  8  Dean  Street,  Borough, 
and  then  for  half  a  year  or  more  with  several  other 
students  over  the  shop  of  a  tallow  chandler  named 
Markham  ^  in  St  Thomas's  Street.  Thence,  in  the 
summer  or  early  autumn  of  1816,  leaving  the  near 
neighbourhood  of  the  hospitals,  he  went  to  join  his 
brothers  in  rooms  in  The  Poultry,  over  a  passage  leading 
to  the  Queen's  Head  Tavern.  Finally,  early  in  1817, 
they  all  three  moved  for  a  short  time  to  76  Cheapside. 
For  filHng  up  this  skeleton  record,  we  have  some  tradi- 
tions of  the  hospital  concerning  Keats' s  teachers,  some 
recollections  of  fellow  students, — of  one,  Mr  Henry 
Stephens,  in  particular, — ^together  with  further  reminis- 
cences by  Cowden  Clarke  and  impressions  recorded  in 
after  years  by  one  and  another  of  a  circle  of  acquaintances 
which  fast  expanded.  Moreover  Keats  begins  during 
this  period  to  tell  something  of  his  own  story,  in  the 
form  of  a  few  poems  of  a  personal  tenor  and  a  very  few 
letters  written  to  and  preserved  by  his  friends. 

As  to  his  hospital  work,  it  is  clear  that  though  his 
heart  was  not  in  it  and  his  thoughts  were  prone  to  wander, 
and  though  he  held  and  declared  that  poetry  was  the 
only  thing  worth  living  for,  yet  when  he  chose  he  could 
bend  his  mind  and  will  to  the  tasks  before  him.  The 
operations  which  as  dresser  he  performed  or  assisted  in 
are  said  to  have  proved  him  no  fumbler.  When  he 
went  up  for  examination  before  the  Court  of  Apothecaries 
he  passed  with  ease  and  credit,  somewhat  to  the  surprise 
of  his  fellow  students,  who  put  his  success  down  to  his 
knowledge  of  Latin  rather  than  of  medicine.  Later, 
after  he  had  abandoned  the  profession,  he  was  always 
ready  to  speak  or  act  with  a  certain  authority  in  cases 
of  illness  or  emergency,  and  though  hating  the  notion 

1  Another  account  says  Mitchell. 


APTITUDES  AND  AMBITIONS  29 

of  practice  evidently  did  not  feel  himseK  unqualified 
for  it  so  far  as  knowledge  went.  He  could  not  find  in 
the  scientific  part  of  the  study  a  satisfying  occupation 
for  his  thoughts;  and  though  a  few  years  later,  when  he 
had  realised  that  there  is  no  kind  of  knowledge  but 
may  help  to  nourish  a  poet's  mind,  he  felt  unwilling 
to  lose  hold  of  what  he  had  learned  as  apprentice  and 
student,  he  was  never  caught  by  that  special  passion 
of  philosophical  curiosity  which  laid  hold  for  a  season 
on  Coleridge  and  Shelley  successively,  and  drew  them 
powerfully  towards  the  study  of  the  mechanism  and 
mysteries  of  the  human  frame.  The  practical  respon- 
sibilities of  the  profession  at  the  same  time  weighed 
upon  him,  and  he  was  conscious  of  a  kind  of  absent 
uneasy  wonder  at  his  own  skill.  Once  when  Cowden 
Clarke  asked  him  about  his  prospects  and  feelings  in 
regard  to  his  profession,  he  frankly  declared  his  own 
sense  of  his  unfitness  for  it;  with  reasons  such  as  this, 
that  'the  other  day,  during  the  lecture,  there  came  a 
sunbeam  into  the  room,  and  with  it  a  whole  troop  of 
creatures  floating  in  the  ray;  and  I  was  off  with  them 
to  Oberon  and  fairy-land.'  'My  last  operation,'  he 
once  told  another  friend,  'was  the  opening  of  a  man's 
temporal  artery.  I  did  it  with  the  utmost  nicety, 
but  reflecting  on  what  passed  through  my  mind  at  the 
time,  my  dexterity  seemed  a  miracle,  and  I  never  took 
up  the  lancet  again.' 

The  surgeon  to  whom  he  was  specially  assigned  as 
pupil,  Mr  Lucas,  seems  to  have  had  few  qualifications 
as  a  teacher.  We  have  the  following  lively  character 
of  him  from  a  man  afterwards  liighly  honoured  in  the 
profession,  John  Flint  South,  who  walked  the  hospitals 
at  the  same  time  as  Keats: — 'A  tall  ungainly  awkward 
man,  with  stooping  shoulders  and  a  shuflfling  walk,  as 
deaf  as  a  post,  not  overburdened  with  brains,  but  very 
good  natured  and  easy,  and  liked  by  everyone.  His 
surgical  acquirements  were  very  small,  his  operations 
generally  very  badly  performed,  and  accompanied  with 
much  bungling,  if  not  worse.'    But  the  teacher  from 


30  TEACHERS 

whom  Keats  will  really,  as  all  witnesses  agree,  have 
learnt  the  best  of  what  he  knew  was  the  great  dissector 
and  anatomist,  Astley  Cooper,  then  almost  in  the  zenith 
of  his  power  as  a  lectiu*er  and  of  his  popular  fame  and 
practice.  He  is  described  as  one  of  the  handsomest 
and  most  ingratiating  of  men,  as  well  as  one  of  the  most 
indefatigable  and  energetic,  with  an  admirable  gift  of 
exposition  made  racy  by  a  strong  East  AngHan  accent; 
and  it  is  on  record  that  he  took  an  interest  in  young 
Keats,  and  recommended  him  to  the  special  care  of  his 
own  dresser  and  namesake,  George  Cooper.  It  was  in 
consequence  of  this  recommendation  that  Keats  left 
his  solitary  lodging  in  Dean  Street  and  went  to  live  as 
housemate  in  St  Thomas's  Street  with  three  other 
students,  the  aforesaid  George  Cooper,  one  George 
Wilson  Mackereth,  and  Henry  Stephens,  the  last-named 
afterwards  a  surgeon  in  good  repute  as  well  as  a  dabbler 
in  dramatic  literature.  It  is  from  Stephens  that  we  get 
much  the  fullest  picture  of  Keats  in  these  student  days. 
I  give  the  pith  of  his  reminiscences,  partly  as  quoted 
from  his  conversation  by  an  intimate  friend  in  the  same 
profession.  Sir  Benjamin  Ward  Richardson,^  partly  as 
written  down  by  himself  for  Lord  Houghton's  informar 
tion  in  1847.^ 

Whether  it  was  in  the  latter  part  of  the  year  1815  or  the  early 
part  of  the  year  1816  that  my  acquaintance  with  John  Keats 
commenced  I  cannot  say.  We  were  both  students  at  the  united 
hospitals  of  St  Thomas's  and  Guy's,  and  we  had  apartments 
in  a  house  in  St  Thomas's  Street,  kept  by  a  decent  respectable 
woman  of  the  name  of  Mitchell  I  think.  [After  naming  his 
other  fellow  students,  the  witness  goes  on] — ^John  Keats  being 
alone,  and  to  avoid  the  expense  of  having  a  sitting  room  to 
himself,  asked  to  join  us,  which  we  readily  acceded  to.  We 
were  therefore  constant  companions,  and  the  following  is  what 
I  recollect  of  his  previous  history  from  conversation  with  him. 
Of  his  parentage  I  know  nothing,  for  upon  that  subject  I  never 
remember  his  speaking,  I  think  he  was  an  orphan.  He  had 
been  apprenticed  to  a  Mr  Hammond  surgeon  of  Southgate 
from  whence  he  came  on  the  completion  of  his  time  to  the 

1  In  The  Asclepiad,  April  1884.  *  Houghton  MSS. 


TESTIMONY  OF  HENRY  STEPHENS       31 

hospitals.  His  passion,  if  I  may  so  call  it,  for  poetry  was  soon 
manifested.  He  attended  lectm*es  and  went  through  the  usual 
routine  but  he  had  no  desire  to  excel  in  that  pursuit.  .  .  . 
He  was  called  by  his  fellow  students  'little  Keats,'  being  at 
his  full  growth  no  more  than  five  feet  high.  ...  In  a  room,  he 
was  always  at  the  window,  peering  into  space,  so  that  the  window- 
seat  was  spoken  of  by  his  comrades  as  Keats's  place.  ...  In 
the  lecture  room  he  seemed  to  sit  apart  and  to  be  absorbed  in 
something  else,  as  if  the  subject  suggested  thoughts  to  him  which 
were  not  practically  connected  with  it.  He  was  often  in  the 
subject  and  out  of  it,  in  a  dreamy  way. 

He  never  attached  much  consequence  to  his  own  studies  in 
medicine,  and  indeed  looked  upon  the  medical  career  as  the 
career  by  which  to  live  in  a  workaday  world,  without  being 
certain  that  he  could  keep  up  the  strain  of  it.  He  nevertheless 
had  a  consciousness  of  his  own  powers,  and  even  of  his  own 
greatness,  though  it  might  never  be  recognised.  .  .  .  Poetry  was 
to  his  mind  the  zenith  of  all  his  aspirations:  the  only  thing 
worthy  the  attention  of  superior  minds:  so  he  thought:  all 
other  pursuits  were  mean  and  tame.  He  had  no  idea  of  fame 
or  greatness  but  as  it  was  connected  with  the  pursuits  of  poetry, 
or  the  attainment  of  poetical  excellence.  The  greatest  men  in 
the  world  were  the  poets  and  to  rank  among  them  was  the  chief 
object  of  his  ambition.  It  may  readily  be  imagined  that  this 
feeling  was  accompanied  with  a  good  deal  of  pride  and  conceit, 
and  that  amongst  mere  medical  students  he  would  walk  and 
talk  as  one  of  the  Gods  might  be  supposed  to  do  when  mingling 
with  mortals.  This  pride  exposed  him,  as  may  be  readily 
imagined,  to  occasional  ridicule,  and  some  mortification. 

Having  a  taste  and  liking  for  poetry  myself,  though  at  that 
time  but  little  cultivated,  he  regarded  me  as  something  a  little 
superior  to  the  rest,  and  would  gratify  himself  frequently  by 
shewing  me  some  lines  of  his  writing,  or  some  new  idea  which 
he  had  struck  out.  We  had  frequent  conversation  on  the  merits 
of  particular  poets,  but  our  tastes  did  not  agree.  He  was  a 
great  admirer  of  Sp^enser,  his  Faerie  Queene  was  a  great  favourite 
wi^  him.  Byron  was  also  in  favour.  Pope  he  maintained  was 
no  poet,  ohly  a  versifier.  He  was  fond  of  imagery,  the  most 
trifling  similes  appeared  to  please  him.  Sometimes  I  ventured 
to  show  him  some  lines  which  I  had  written,  but  I  always  had 
the  mortification  of  hearing  them  condemned,  indeed  he  seemed 
to  think  it  presumption  in  me  to  attempt  to  tread  along  the  same 
pathway  as  himself  at  however  humble  a  distance. 

He  had  two  brothers,  who  visited  him  frequently,  and  they 
worshipped   him.     They   seemed   to    think   their   brother   John 


32  PRIDE  AND  OTHER  CHARACTERISTICS 

was  to  be  exalted,  and  to  exalt  the  family  name.  I  remember 
a  student  from  St  Bartholomew's  Hospital  who  came  often  to 
see  him,  as  they  had  formerly  been  intimate,  but  though  old 
friends  they  did  not  cordially  agree.  Newmarsh  or  Newmarch 
(I  forget  which  was  his  name)  was  a  classical  scholar,  as  was 
Keats,  and  therefore  they  scanned  freely  the  respective  merits 
of  the  Poets  of  Greece  and  Rome.  Whenever  Keats  showed 
Newmarch  any  of  his  poetry  it  was  sure  to  be  ridiculed  ai^d 
severely  handled. 

Newmarch  was  a  light-hearted  and  merry  fellow,  but  I  thought 
he  was  rather  too  fond  of  mortifying  Keats,  but  more  particularly 
his  brothers,  as  their  praise  of  their  brother  John  amounted 
almost  to  idolatry,  and  Newmarch  and  they  frequently  quarrelled. 
Whilst  attending  lectures  he  would  sit  and  instead  of  copying 
out  the  lecture,  would  often  scribble  some  doggrel  rhymes  among 
the  notes  of  Lecture,  particularly  if  he  got  hold  of  another 
student's  syllabus.  In  my  syllabus  of  chemical  lectures  he 
scribbled  many  lines  on  the  paper  cover.  This  cover  has  been 
long  torn  off,  except  one  small  piece  on  which  is  the  following 
fragment  of  doggrel  rhyme : — 

Give  me  women,  wine  and  snuff 
Until  I  cry  out,  *hold !  enough' 
You  may  do  so,  sans  objection 
Until  the  day  of  resurrection. 

This  is  all  that  remains,  and  is  the  only  piece  of  his  writing  which 
is  now  in  my  possession.  He  was  gentlemanly  in  his  manners 
and  when  he  condescended  to  talk  upon  other  subjects  he  was 
agreeable  and  intelligent.  He  was  quick  and  apt  at  learning, 
when  he  chose  to  give  his  attention  to  any  subject.  He  was  a 
steady  quiet  and  well  behaved  person,  never  inclined  to  pursuits 

of  a  low  or  vicious  character. 

f 

The  last  words  need  to  be  read  in  the  light  of  the  con- 
vivial snatch  of  verse  quoted  just  above.  Keats  in 
these  days  was  no  rake,  indeed,  but  neither  was  he  a 
puritan:  his  passions  were  strong  in  proportion  to  the 
general  intensity  of  his  being:  and  his  ardent  absorption 
in  poetry  and  study  did  not  save  him  from  the  risks  and 
sHps  incident  to  appetite  and  hot  blood. 

Another  fellow  student  relates: — 'even  in  the  lecture 
room  of  St  Thomas's  I  have  seen  Keats  in  a  deep  poetic 
dream;  his  mind  was  on  Parnassus  with  the  Muses. 
And  here  is  a  quaint  fragment  which  he  one  evening 


EVIDENCES  OF  A  WANDERING  MIND    33 

scribbled  in  our  presence,  while  the  precepts  of  Sir 
Astley  Cooper  fell  unheeded  on  his  ear.'  The  fragment 
tells  how  Alexander  the  Great  saw  and  loved  a  lady  of 
surpassing  beauty  on  his  march  through  India,  and  reads 
like  the  beginning  of  an  attempt  to  tell  the  story  of  the 
old  French  Lai  d^Aristote  in  the  style  and  spelling  of  an 
early-printed  English  prose  romance, — ^possibly  the  Morte 
d^Arthure.  Into  his  would-be  archaic  prose,  luxuriantly 
describing  the  lady's  beauty,  Keats  works  in  tags  taken 
direct  from  Spenser  and  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  all 
three.  He  no  doubt  knew  this  favourite  mediaeval  tale 
— ^that  of  the  Indian  damsel  whose  charms  enslaved  first 
Alexander  in  the  midst  of  his  conquests  and  then  his 
tutor  Aristotle — either  in  the  eighteenth-century  prose 
version  of  Le  Grand  or  the  recent  English  verse  trans- 
lation by  G.  L.  Way,  who  turns  the  tale  in  couplets  of 
this  style: — 

At  the  first  glance  all  dreams  of  conquest  fade 
And  his  first  thought  is  of  his  Indian  maid. 

I  cannot  but  think  the  Indian  maiden  of  this  story  must 
have  been  still  Hngering  in  Keats's  imagination  when  he 
devised  the  episode  of  that  other  Indian  maiden  in  the 
fourth  book  of  Endymion} 

Besides  these  records,  we  have  an  actual  tangible  relic 
to  show  how  Keats's  attention  in  the  lecture  room  was 
now  fixed  and  now  wandered,  in  the  shape  of  a  notebook 
in  which  some  other  student  has  begun  to  put  down 
anatomy  notes  and  Keats  has  followed.  Beginning  from 
both  ends,  he  has  made  notes  of  an  anatomical  and  also 
of  a  surgical  course,  which  are  not  those  of  a  lax  or 
inaccurate  student,  but  full  and  close  as  far  as  they  go; 
only  squeezed  into  the  margins  of  one  or  two  pages  there 
are  signs  of  flagging  attention  in  the  shape  of  sketches, 
rather  prettily  touched,  of  a  pansy  and  other  flowers.^ 

After  the  first  weeks  of  autumn  gloom  spent  in  solitary 

*  Le  Grand  :    Fabliaux  ou  Contes,  1781.     G.  L.  Way  :    Fabliaux  or  Tales, 
London,  1800;  2nd  ed.  1815.     See  Appendix  I. 

*  This  notebook  is  in  the  collection  bequeathed  by  the  late  Sir  Charles 
Dilke  to  the  public  Ubrary  at  Hampstead, 


34  SERVICES  OF  COWDEN  CLARKE 

lodgings  in  the  dingiest  part  of  London,  Keats  expresses, 
in  a  rimed  epistle  to  Felton  Mathew,  the  fear  lest  his 
present  studies  and  surroundings  should  stifle  the  poetic 
faculty  in  him  altogether.  About  the  same  time  he 
takes  pains  to  get  into  touch  again  with  Cowden  Clarke, 
who  had  by  this  time  left  Enfield  and  was  living  with  a 
brother-in-law  in  Clerkenwell.  In  a  letter  unluckily  not 
dated,  but  certainly  belonging  to  these  first  autumn 
weeks  in  London,  Keats  writes  to  Clarke: — ^Although 
the  Borough  is  a  beastly  place  in  dirt,  turnings,  and  wind- 
ings, yet  No  8,  Dean  Street,  is  not  difficult  to  find;  and  if 
you  would  run  the  gauntlet  over  London  Bridge,  take 
the  first  turning  to  the  right,  and,  moreover,  knock  at 
my  door,  which  is  nearly  opposite  a  meeting,  you  would 
do  me  a  charity,  which,  as  St  Paul  saith,  is  the  father 
of  all  the  virtues.  At  all  events,  let  me  hear  from  you 
soon :  I  say,  at  all  events,  not  excepting  the  gout  in  your 
fingers.'  Clarke  seems  to  have  complied  promptly  with 
this  petition,  and  before  many  months  their  renewed 
intercourse  had  momentous  consequences.  Keats's  fear 
that  the  springs  of  poetry  would  dry  up  in  him  was  not 
fulfilled,  and  he  kept  trying  his  prentice  hand  in  various 
modes  of  verse.  Some  of  the  sonnets  recorded  to  have 
belonged  to  the  year  1815,  as  Woman,  when  I  behold  thee, 
Happy  is  England,  may  have  been  written  in  London  at 
the  close  of  that  year:  a  number  of  others,  showing  a 
gradually  strengthening  touch,  belong,  we  know,  to  the 
spring  and  early  simmier  of  the  next.  For  his  brother 
George  to  send  to  his  fiancee.  Miss  Georgiana  Wylie,  on 
Valentine's  day,  Feb.  14,  1816,  he  wrote  the  pleasant 
set  of  heptasyllabics  beginning  'Hadst  thou  lived  in 
days  of  old.'  In  the  same  month  was  published  Leigh 
Hunt's  poem  The  Story  of  Rimini,  and  by  this,  working 
together  with  his  rooted  enthusiasm  for  Spenser,  Keats 
was  immediately  inspired  to  begin  an  attempt  at  a 
chivalrous  romance  of  his  own,  Calidore;  which  went 
no  farther  than  an  Induction  and  some  hundred  and 
fifty  opening  lines. 

Cowden  Clarke  had  kept  up  his  acquaintance  with 


INTRODUCTION  TO  LEIGH  HUNT         35 

Leigh  Hunt,  and  was  in  the  habit  of  going  up  to  visit 
him  at  the  cottage  where  he  was  now  Hving  at  Hampstead, 
in  the  Vale  of  Health.  Some  time  in  the  late  spring  of 
1816  Clarke  made  known  to  Hunt  first  some  of  Keats's 
efforts  in  poetry  and  then  Keats  himself.  Both  Clarke 
and  Hunt  have  told  the  story,  both  writing  at  a  con- 
siderable, and  Clarke  at  a  very  long,  interval  after  the 
event.  In  their  main  substance  the  two  accounts  agree, 
but  both  are  in  some  points  confused,  telescoping  together, 
as  memory  is  apt  to  do,  circumstances  really  separated 
by  an  interval  of  months.  One  firm  fact  we  have  to 
start  with, — that  Hunt  printed  in  his  paper,  the  Examiner , 
for  May  5th,  1816,  Keats's  sonnet,  0  Solitude ,  if  I  with 
thee  must  dwell.  This  was  Keats's  first  appearance  in 
print,  and  a  decisive  circumstance  in  his  life.  Clarke, 
it  appears,  had  taken  up  the  ^Solitude'  sonnet  and  a  few 
other  manuscript  verses  of  Keats  to  submit  to  Leigh 
Hunt  for  his  opinion,  ^  and  had  every  reason  to  be  grati- 
fied at  the  result.    Here  is  his  story  of  what  happened. 


I  took  with  me  two  or  three  of  the  poems  I  had  received  from 
Keats.  I  could  not  but  anticipate  that  Hunt  would  speak 
encouragingly,  and  indeed  approvingly,  of  the  compositions — 
written,  too,  by  a  youth  under  age;  but  my  partial  spirit  was 
not  prepared  for  the  unhesitating  and  prompt  admiration  which 
broke  forth  before  he  had  read  twenty  lines  of  the  first  poem. 
Horace  Smith  happened  to  be  there  on  the  occasion,  and  he  was 
not  less  demonstrative  in  his  appreciation  of  their  merits.  .  .  . 
After  making  numerous  and  eager  inquiries  about  him  personally, 
and  with  reference  to  any  peculiarities  of  mind  and  manner, 
the  visit  ended  in  my  being  requested  to  bring  him  over  to  the 
Vale  of  Health. 

That  was  a  *  red-letter  day'  in  the  young  poet's  life,  and  one 
which  will  never  fade  with  me  while  memory  lasts.  The  char- 
acter and  expression  of  Keats's  features  would  arrest  even  the 
casual  passenger  in  the  street;  and  now  they  were  wrought  to 
a  tone  of  animation  that  I  could  not  but  watch  with  interest, 
knowing  what  was  in  store  for  him  from  the  bland  encouragement, 

1  In  a  review  of  Keats's  first  book  written  the  next  year  {Examiner, 
July  9,  1817)  Hunt  says  that  when  he  printed  the  'Solitude'  sonnet  he 
knew  no  more  of  Keats  than  of  any  other  anonymous  correspondent: 
but  this  probably  only  means  that  he  had  not  yet  met  Keats  personally. 


36        SUMMER  WALKS  AT  HAMPSTEAD 

and  Spartan  deference  in  attention,  with  fascinating  conversa- 
tional eloquence,  that  he  was  to  encounter  and  receive.  As  we 
approached  the  Heath,  there  was  the  rising  and  accelerated 
step,  with  the  gradual  subsidence  of  all  talk.  The  interview, 
which  stretched  into  three  'morning  calls,'  was  the  prelude  to 
many  after-scenes  and  saunterings  about  Caen  Wood  and  its 
neighbourhood;  for  Keats  was  suddenly  made  a  familiar  of  the 
household,  and  was  always  welcomed. 

In  connection  with  this,  take  Hunt^s  own  account  of  the 
matter,  as  given  about  ten  years  after  the  event  in  his 
volume,  Lord  Byron  and  his  Contemporaries : 

To  Mr  Clarke  I  was  indebted  for  my  acquaintance  with  him. 
I  shall  never  forget  the  impression  made  upon  me  by  the  exuberant 
specimens  of  genuine  though  young  poetry  that  were  laid  before 
me,  and  the  promise  of  which  was  seconded  by  the  fine  fervid 
countenance  of  the  writer.  We  became  intimate  on  the  spot, 
and  I  found  the  young  poet's  heart  as  warm  as  his  imagination. 
We  read  and  walked  together,  and  used  to  write  verses  of  an 
evening  on  a  given  subject.  No  imaginative  pleasure  was  left 
unnoticed  by  us,  or  unen joyed,  from  the  recollections  of  the  bards 
and  patriots  of  old  to  the  luxury  of  a  summer's  rain  at  our  window 
or  the  clicking  of  the  coal  in  winter- time. 

Some  inquirers,  in  interpreting  these  accounts,  have 
judged  that  the  personal  introduction  did  not  take  place 
in  the  spring  or  early  summer  at  all,  but  only  after 
Keats's  return  from  his  holiday  at  the  end  of  September. 
I  think  it  is  quite  clear,  on  the  contrary,  that  Clarke  had 
taken  Keats  up  to  Hampstead  by  the  end  of  May  or 
some  time  in  June.  Unmistakeable  impressions  of 
summer  strolls  there  occur  in  his  poetry  of  the  next 
few  months.  The  ^ happy  fields'  where  he  had  been 
rambling  when  he  wrote  the  sonnet  to  Charles  Wells 
on  June  the  29th  were  almost  certainly  the  fields  of 
Hampstead,  and  there  is  no  reason  to  doubt  Hunt's 
statement  that  the  ^little  hiir  from  which  Keats  drank 
the  summer  view  and  air,  as  told  at  the  opening  of  his 
poem  /  stood  tiptoe,  was  one  of  the  swells  of  ground 
towards  the  Caen  wood  side  of  the  Heath.  At  the  same 
time  it  would  seem  that  their  intercourse  in  these  first 
weeks  did  not  extend  beyond  a  few  walks  and  talks, 


HOLIDAY  EPISTLES  FROM  MARGATE     37 

and  that  it  was  not  until  after  Keats's  return  from  his 
summer  hoHday  that  the  acquaintance  ripened  into  the 
close  and  delighted  intimacy  which  we  find  subsisting 
by  the  autumn. 

For  part  of  August  and  September  he  had  been  away 
at  Margate,  apparently  alone.  A  couple  of  rimed 
epistles  addressed  during  this  holiday  to  his  brother 
George  and  to  Cowden  Clarke  breathe  just  such  a 
heightened  joy  of  life  and  happiness  of  anticipation  as 
would  be  natural  in  one  who  had  lately  felt  the  first 
glow  of  new  and  inspiriting  personal  sympathies.  To 
George,  besides  the  epistle,  he  addressed  a  pleasant 
sonnet  on  the  wonders  he  has  seen,  the  sea,  the  sunsets, 
and  the  world  of  poetic  glories  and  mysteries  vaguely 
evoked  by  them  in  his  mind.  The  epistle  to  George 
is  dated  August:  that  to  Cowden  Clarke  followed  in 
September.  In  it  he  explains,  in  a  well-conditioned 
and  affectionate  spirit  of  youthful  modesty,  why  he  has 
hitherto  been  shy  of  addressing  any  of  his  own  attempts 
in  verse  to  a  friend  so  familiar  with  the  work  of  the 
masters;  and  takes  occasion,  in  a  heartfelt  passage  of 
autobiography,  to  declare  all  he  has  owed  to  that 
friend's  guidance  and  encouragement. 

Thus  have  I  thought;  and  days  on  days  have  flown 

Slowly,  or  rapidly — unwilling  still 

For  you  to  try  my  dull,  unlearned  quill. 

Nor  should  I  now,  but  that  I've  known  you  long; 

That  you  first  taught  me  all  the  sweets  of  song: 

The  grand,  the  sweet,  the  terse,  the  free,  the  fine; 

What  swell'd  with  pathos,  and  what  right  divine: 

Spenserian  vowels  that  elope  with  ease. 

And  float  along  like  birds  o'er  summer  seas; 

Miltonian  storms,  and  more,  Miltonian  tenderness, 

Michael  in  arms,  and  more,  meek  Eve's  fair  slenderness. 

Who  read  for  me  the  sonnet  swelling  loudly 
Up  to  its  climax  and  then  dying  proudly  ? 
Who  found  for  me  the  grandeur  of  the  ode. 
Growing,  like  Atlas,  stronger  from  its  load  ? 
Who  let  me  taste  that  more  than  cordial  dram. 
The  sharp,  the  rapier-pointed  epigram  ? 


38  RETURN  TO  LONDON 

Show'd  me  that  epic  was  of  all  the  king, 

Round,  vast,  and  spanning  all  like  Saturn's  ring  ? 

You  too  upheld  the  veil  from  Clio's  beauty. 

And  pointed  out  the  patriot's  stern  duty; 

The  might  of  Alfred,  and  the  shaft  of  Tell; 

The  hand  of  Brutus,  that  so  grandly  fell 

Upon  a  tyrant's  head.     Ah !  had  I  never  seen. 

Or  known  your  kindness,  what  might  I  have  been  ? 

What  my  enjoyments  in  my  youthful  years, 

Bereft  of  all  that  now  my  life  endears  ? 

And  can  I  e'er  these  benefits  forget? 

And  can  I  e'er  repay  the  friendly  debt? 

No  doubly  no; — ^yet  should  these  rhymings  please, 

I  shall  roll  on  the  grass  with  two-fold  ease : 

For  I  have  long  time  been  my  fancy  feeding 

With  hopes  that  you  would  one  day  think  the  reading 

Of  my  rough  verses  not  an  hour  misspent; 

Should  it  e'er  be  so,  what  a  rich  content ! 

Some  of  these  lines  are  merely  feeble  and  boyish,  but 
some  show  a  fast  ripening,  nay  an  almost  fully  ripened, 
critical  feeling  for  the  poetry  of  the  past.  The  couplet 
about  Spenser's  vowels  could  scarcely  be  happier,  and 
the  next  on  Milton  anticipates,  though  without  at  all 
approaching  in  craftsmanship,  the  ^Me  rather  all  that 
bowery  loneliness'  of  Tennyson's  famous  alcaic  stanzas 
to  the  same  effect. 

Coming  back  from  the  seaside  about  the  end  of 
September  to  take  up  his  quarters  with  his  brothers  in 
their  lodging  in  the  Poultry,  Keats  was  soon  to  be 
indebted  to  Clarke  for  another  and  invaluable  literary 
stimulus:  I  mean  his  first  knowledge  of  Chapman's 
translation  of  Homer.  This  experience,  as  every  reader 
knows,  was  instantly  celebrated  by  him  in  a  sonnet, 
classical  now  ahnost  to  triteness,  which  is  his  first  high 
achievement,  and  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  our  lan- 
guage in  this  form.  The  question  of  its  exact  date  has 
been  much  discussed:  needlessly,  seeing  that  Keats 
himself  signed  and  dated  it  in  full,  when  it  was  printed 
in  the  Examiner  for  the  first  of  December  following, 
'Ocf  1816,  John  Keats.'  The  doubts  expressed  have 
been  due  partly  to  the  overlooking  of  this  fact  and 


FIRST  READING  OF  CHAPMAN'S  HOMER  39 

partly  to  a  mistake  in  Cowden  Clarke's  account  of  the 
matter  written  many  years  later.  After  quoting  Keats's 
invitation  of  October  1815  to  come  and  find  him  at 
his  lodging  in  the  Borough,  Clarke  goes  on: — 

This  letter  having  no  date  but  the  week's  day,  and  no  postmark, 
preceded  our  first  symposium;  and  a  memorable  night  it  was  in 
my  life's  career.  A  beautiful  copy  of  the  folio  edition  of  Chap- 
man's translation  of  Homer  had  been  lent  me.  It  was  the  pro- 
perty of  Mr.  Alsager,  the  gentleman  who  for  years  had  contributed 
no  small  share  of  celebrity  to  the  great  reputation  of  the  Times 
newspaper  by  the  masterly  manner  in  which  he  conducted  the 
money-market  department  of  that  journal.  ... 

Well  then,  we  were  put  in  possession  of  the  Homer  of  Chapman, 
and  to  work  we  went,  turning  to  some  of  the  *  f amousest'  passages, 
as  we  had  scrappily  known  them  in  Pope's  version.  There  was, 
for  instance,  that  perfect  scene  of  the  conversation  on  Troy  wall 
of  the  old  Senators  with  Helen,  who  is  pointing  out  to  them  the 
several  Greek  Captains;  with  the  Senator  An  tenor's  vivid  por- 
trait of  an  orator  in  Ulysses,  beginning  at  the  237th  line  of  the 
third  book: — 

But  when  the  prudent  Ithacus  did  to  his  counsels  rise. 

He  stood  a  little  still,  and  fix'd  upon  the  earth  his  eyes, 

His  sceptre  moving  neither  way,  but  held  it  formally. 

Like  one  that  vainly  doth  affect.     Of  wrathful  quality. 

And  frantic  (rashly  judging),  you  would  have  said  he  was; 

But  when  out  of  his  ample  breast  he  gave  his  great  voice  pass. 

And  words  that  flew  about  our  ears  like  drifts  of  winter's 

snow. 
None   thenceforth   might   contend   with  him,   though  naught 

admired  for  show. 

The  shield  and  helmet  of  Diomed,  with  the  accompanying 
simile,  in  the  opening  of  the  third  book;  and  the  prodigious 
description  of  Neptune's  passage  to  the  Achive  ships,  in  the 
thirteenth  book: — 

The  woods  and  all  the  great  hills  near  trembled  beneath  the 

weight 
Of  his  immortal-moving  feet.     Three  steps  he  only  took. 
Before  he  far-off  ^gas  reach'd,  but  with  the  fourth,  it  shook 
With  his  dread  entry. 

One  scene  I  could  not  fail  to  introduce  to  him — the  shipwreck 
of  Ulysses,  in  the  fifth  book  of  the  Odysseis,  and  I  had  the 


40        DATE  OF  THE  CHAPMAN  SONNET 

reward  of  one  of  his  delighted  stares,  upon  reading  the  following 
lines: — 

Then  forth  he  came,  his  both  knees  falt'ring,  both 
His  strong  hands  hanging  down,  and  all  with  froth 
His  cheeks  and  nostrils  flowing,  voice  and  breath 
Spent  to  all  use,  and  down  he  sank  to  death. 
The  sea  had  soak'd  his  heart  through)  all  his  veins 
His  toils  had  rack'd  t'  a  labouring  woman*s  pains. 
Dead-weary  was  he. 

On  an  after-occasion  I  showed  him  the  couplet,  in  Pope's 
translation,  upon  the  same  passage: — 

From  mouth  and  nose  the  briny  torrent  ran. 
And  lost  in  lassitude  lay  all  the  man.     ( !  !  !) 

Chapman  supplied  us  with  many  an  after-treat;  but  it  was  in 
the  teeming  wonderment  of  this  his  first  introduction,  that,  when 
I  came  down  to  breakfast  the  next  morning,  I  found  upon  my 
table  a  letter  with  no  other  enclosure  than  his  famous  sonnet. 
On  First  Looking  into  Chapman's  Homer.  We  had  parted,  as 
I  have  already  said,  at  day-spring,  yet  he  contrived  that  I  should 
receive  the  poem  from  a  distance  of,  may  be,  two  miles  by  ten 
o'clock. 

The  whole  of  the  above  is  a  typical  case  of  what  I 
have  called  the  telescoping  action  of  memory.  Recol- 
lections not  of  one,  but  of  many,  Homer  readings  are 
here  compressed  into  a  couple  of  paragraphs.  They 
will  have  been  readings  carried  on  at  intervals  through 
the  autumn  and  winter  of  1816-17:  an  inspiring  addition 
to  the  other  intellectual  gains  and  pleasures  which  fell  to 
Keats's  lot  during  those  months.  There  is  no  reason 
to  doubt  the  exactness  of  darkens  account  of  the  first 
night  the  friends  spent  together  over  Chapman  and  its 
result  in  the  shape  of  the  sonnet  which  lay  on  his  table 
the  next  morning.  His  error  is  in  remembering  these 
circumstances  as  having  happened  when  he  and  Keats 
first  foregathered  in  London  in  the  autumn  of  1815, 
whereas  Keats's  positive  evidence  above  quoted  shows 
that  they  did  not  reaUy  happen  until  a  year  later,  after 
his  return  from  his  summer  holiday  in  1816.^    Before 

1  Putting  day-break  in  early  October  at  a  little  before  six,  there  would 
have  been  fully  time  enough  for  Keats  to  walk  to  the  Poultry,  composing 
as  he  went,  and  to  commit  his  draft  to  paper  and  send  it  to  ClerkenweU 


INTIMACY  WITH  LEIGH  HUNT  41 

printing  the  Chapman  sonnet,  Leigh  Hiuit  had  the 
satisfaction  of  hearing  his  own  opinion  of  it  and  of 
some  other  manuscript  poems  of  Keats  confirmed  by 
good  judges.  I  quote  his  words  for  the  sake  of  the 
excellent  concluding  phrase.  'Not  long  afterwards, 
having  the  pleasm'e  of  entertaining  at  dinner  Mr  God- 
win, Mr  Hazlitt,  and  Mr  Basil  Montague,  I  showed 
them  the  verses  of  my  young  friend,  and  they  were 
pronounced  to  be  as  extraordinary  as  I  thought 
them.  One  of  them  was  that  noble  sonnet  on  first 
reading  Chapman^s  Homer,  which  terminates  with  so 
energetic  a  calmness,  and  which  completely  announced 
the  new  poet  taking  possession.'  But  by  this  time 
Keats  had  become  an  established  intimate  in  the 
Leigh  Hunt  household,  and  was  constantly  backwards 
and  forwards  between  London  and  the  Hampstead 
cottage. 

This  intimacy  w^as  really  the  opening  of  a  new  chapter 
both  in  his  intellectual  and  social  life.  At  first  it  was 
a  source  of  unmixed  encouragement  and  pleasure,  but 
seeing  that  it  carried  with  it  in  the  sequel  disadvantages 
and  penalties  which  gravely  affected  Keats's  career,  it 
is  necessary  that  we  shoiild  fix  clearly  in  our  mind 
Hunt's  previous  history  and  the  place  held  by  him  in 
the  Hterary  and  political  life  of  the  time.  He  was 
Keats's  senior  by  eleven  years:  the  son  of  an  eloquent 
and  elegant,  self-indulgent  and  thriftless  fashionable 
preacher,  sprung  from  a  family  long  settled  in  Bar- 
badoes,  who  having  married  a  lady  from  Philadelphia 
had  migrated  to  England  and  exercised  his  vocation 
in   the   northern   suburbs   of   London.    Brought  up  at 


by  ten  o'clock.  The  longer  walk  to  and  from  the  Borough,  had  the  date 
been  a  year  earUer,  would  have  made  the  feat  more  difficult.  Moreover 
the  feat  itself  becomes  less  of  a  miracle  when  we  recognise  it  as  performed 
not  at  the  end  of  the  poet's  twentieth  year  but  at  the  end  of  his  twenty 
first.  But  in  view  of  Keats's  owti  explicit  dating  of  the  piece,  the  point 
seems  to  need  no  labouring:  or  else  it  might  be  pointed  out  that  if 
Clarke  had  really  introduced  him  to  Chapman  in  October  1815  Chapman 
would  assuredly  not  have  been  left  out  of  the  fist  of  masters  whom  he 
quotes  as  having  known  through  Clarke  in  his  epistle  of  the  following 
August  quoted  above  (pp.  37,  38). 


42  THE  EXAMINER:    HUNT'S  IMPRISONMENT 

Christ's  Hospital  about  a  dozen  years  later  than  Lamb 
and  Coleridge,  Leigh  Hunt  gained  at  sixteen  a  measure 
of  precocious  literary  reputation  with  a  volume  of 
juvenile  poems  which  gave  evidence  of  great  fluency 
and,  for  a  boy,  of  wide  and  eager  reading.  A  few 
years  later  he  came  into  notice  as  a  theatrical  critic, 
being  then  a  clerk  in  the  War  Ofiice:  an  occupation 
which  he  abandoned  at  twenty-four  (in  1808)  in 
order  to  take  part  in  the  conduct  of  the  Examiner 
newspaper,  then  just  foxmded  by  his  brother  John 
Himt.  For  nearly  five  years  the  brothers  Hunt,  as 
manager  and  editor  of  that  journal,  helped  to  fight 
the  losing  battle  of  Hberalism,  in  those  days  of  tense 
grapple  with  the  Corsican  ogre  abroad  and  stiff 
re-action  and  repression  at  home,  with  a  dexterous  brisk 
audacity  and  an  unflinching  sincerity  of  conviction. 
So  far  they  had  escaped  the  usual  penalty  of  such 
courage.  Several  prosecutions  directed  against  them 
failed,  but  at  last,  late  in  1812,  they  were  caught  trip- 
ping. To  go  as  far  as  was  safely  possible  in  satire  of 
the  follies  and  vices  of  the  Prince  Regent  was  a  tempting 
exercise  to  the  reforming  spirits  of  the  time.  Provoked 
by  the  grovelling  excesses  of  some  of  the  Prince's  flat- 
terers, the  Examiner  at  last  broke  bounds  and  denounced 
him  as  'a  violator  of  his  word,  a  libertine  over  head  and 
ears  in  disgrace,  a  despiser  of  domestic  ties,  the  com- 
panion of  gamblers  and  demireps,  a  man  who  had  just 
closed  half  a  century  without  one  single  claim  on  the 
gratitude  of  his  coimtiy  or  the  respect  of  posterity.' 
This  attack  followed  within  a  few  weeks  of  another 
almost  as  stinging  contributed  anonymously  by  Charles 
Lamb.  Under  the  circumstances  the  result  of  a  pro- 
secution could  not  be  doubtful:  and  the  two  Hunts 
were  condemned  to  a  fine  of  £500  each  and  two  years 
imprisonment  in  separate  jails.  Leigh  Hunt  bore  him- 
self in  his  captivity  with  cheerful  fortitude,  suffering 
severely  in  health  but  flagging  little  in  spirits  or  industry. 
He  decorated  his  apartment  in  Horsemonger  Lane  Gaol 
with  a  rose-trellis  paper  and   a  ceiling  to  imitate  a 


HIS  VISITORS  IN  CAPTIVITY  43 

summer  sky,  so  that  it  looked,  said  Charles  Lamb, 
like  a  room  in  a  fairy  tale,  and  spent  money  which  he 
had  not  got  in  converting  its  backyard  into  a  garden 
of  shrubs  and  flowers. 

Very  early  in  Hfe  Hunt  had  been  received  into  a 
family  called  Kent  at  the  instance  of  an  elder  daughter 
who  greatly  admired  him.  Not  long  afterwards  he 
engaged  himself  to  her  younger  sister,  then  almost  a 
child,  and  married  her  soon  after  the  Examiner  was 
started.  She  proved  a  prolific,  thriftless  woman  and  ill 
housekeeper,  but  through  aU  the  rubs  and  pinches  of  his 
after  years  he  was  ever  an  affectionate  husband  and 
father.  His  wife  was  allowed  to  be  with  him  in  prison, 
and  there  they  received  the  visits  of  many  friends  old  and 
new.  Liberal  statesmen,  philosophers,  and  writers,  in- 
cluding characters  so  divers  as  Bentham  and  Byron, 
Brougham  and  Hazlitt,  James  Mill  and  Miss  Edgeworth, 
Tom  Moore  and  Wilkie  the  painter,  pressed  to  offer 
this  victim  of  political  persecution  their  sympathy  and 
society.  Charles  Lamb  and  his  sister  were  the  most 
constant  of  all  his  visitors.  Tom  Moore,  who  both 
before  and  after  the  sentence  on  the  brothers  Himt 
managed  in  his  series  of  verse  skits.  The  Twopenny 
Post  Bag,  to  go  on  playing  with  impimity  the  game  of 
Prince-Regent-baiting, — the  light-hearted  Tom  Moore 
joined  in  deepest  earnest  the  chorus  of  sympathy  with 
the  prisoners: — 

Yet  go — for  thoughts  as  blessed  as  the  air 

Of  Spring  or  Summer  flowers  await  you  there: 

Thoughts  such  as  He,  who  feasts  his  courtly  crew 

In  rich  conservatories,  never  knew; 

Pure  self-esteem — the  smiles  that  light  within — 

The  Zeal,  whose  circling  charities  begin 

With  the  few  lov'd  ones  Heaven  has  plac'd  it  near. 

And  spread,  till  all  Mankind  are  in  its  sphere; 

The  Pride,  that  suffers  without  vaunt  or  plea, 

And  the  fresh  Spirit,  that  can  warble  free, 

Through  prison-bars,  its  hymn  to  Liberty  ! 

Among  ardent  young  men  who  brought  their  tributes 
was  Cowden  Clarke  with  a  basket  of  fruit  and  flowers 


44  HIS  OCCUPATIONS 

from  his  father's  garden;  and  this  was  followed  up  by 
a  weekly  offering  in  the  same  kind.  ^  Libertas,  the  loved 
Libertas/  was  the  name  found  for  Himt  by  such  fond 
young  spirits  and  adopted  by  Keats. 

During  his  captivity  Hunt  was  allowed  the  full  use 
of  his  hbrary,  and  his  chief  reading  was  in  the  fifty 
volumes  of  the  Parnaso  Italiano.  As  a  result  he 
acquired  and  retained  for  life  a  really  wide  and  familiar 
knowledge  of  Italian  poetry.  He  continued  to  edit  the 
Examiner  from  prison  and  occupied  himself  moreover 
with  three  small  volumes  in  verse.  One  of  these  was 
The  Descent  of  Liberty ,  A  Mask,  celebrating  the  downfall 
of  Napoleon  in  1814,  and  embodying  gracefully  enough 
the  Liberal's  hope  against  hope  that  with  that  catas- 
trophe there  might  return  to  Europe  not  only  peace  but 
freedom.  (We  have  told  already  how  Keats  at  Edmonton 
tried  his  boyish  hand  at  a  sonnet  on  the  same  occasion 
and  to  the  same  purpose.)  Another  of  his  prison  tasks 
was  the  writing  of  his  poem,  The  Story  of  Rimini;  a 
third,  the  recasting  and  annotating  of  his  Feast  of  the 
Poets,  an  airily  presumptuous  trifle  in  verse  first  printed 
two  years  before  and  modelled  on  the  precedent  of 
several  rimed  skits  of  the  Caroline  age  such  as  Suckling's 
Session  of  the  Poets  and  the  Duke  of  Buckinghamshire's 
Election  of  a  Poet  Laureate.  It  represented  Apollo  as 
convoking  the  contemporary  British  poets,  or  pretenders 
to  the  poetical  title,  to  a  session,  or  rather  to  a  supper. 
Some  of  those  who  present  themselves  the  god  rejects 
with  scorn,  others  he  cordially  welcomes,  others  he 
admits  with  reserve  and  admonition.  In  revising  this 
skit  while  he  was  in  prison,  Hunt  modified  some  of  his 
earlier  verdicts,  but  in  the  main  he  let  them  stand. 
Moore  and  Campbell  fare  the  best;  Southey  and  Scott 
are  accepted  but  with  reproof;  Coleridge  and  Words- 
worth admonished  (but  Wordsworth  in  much  more 
lenient  terms  than  in  the  first  edition)  and  dismissed. 
Himt's  notes  are  of  still  living  interest  as  setting  forth, 
at  that  pregnant  moment  of  our  literary  history,  the 
considered   judgments   of  a   kindly   and   accomplished 


THE  FEAST  OF  THE  POETS  45 

critic  on  his  contemporaries.  Seen  at  a  distance  of  a 
hundred  years  they  look  short-sighted  enough,  as  almost 
all  contemporary  judgments  must,  and  are  coloured  as 
a  matter  of  course  with  party  feeling,  though  not  so 
grossly  as  was  the  habit  of  the  hour.  Since  Coleridge, 
Southey  and  Wordsworth  had  been  transformed,  first  by 
the  Terror  and  then  by  the  aggressions  of  Bonaparte, 
from  ardent  revolutionary  idealists  into  vehement  parti- 
sans of  reaction  both  at  home  and  abroad,  the  bitterness 
of  the  'Lost  Leader'  feehng,  conmion  to  all  liberals, 
accounts  for  much  of  Hunt's  disparagement  of  them; 
while  besides  sharing  the  prejudice  of  his  party  in 
general  against  Scott  as  a  known  high  Tory  and  friend 
to  kings,  he  had  ignorantly  and  peevishly  conceived  a 
special  grudge  against  that  great  generous  and  chivalrous 
spirit  on  accoimt  of  his  lenient  handling  of  Charles  II 
in  his  Life  of  Dryden.  Hunt  in  his  new  notes  fully 
acknowledged  the  genius,  while  he  condemned  the 
defection  and  also  what  he  thought  the  poetical  perver- 
sities, of  Wordsworth;  but  his  treatment  of  Scott,  as 
Httle  more  than  a  mere  money-making  manufacturer 
of  pinchbeck  northern  lays  in  a  sham  antique  ballad 
dialect,  is  idly  flippant  and  patronising.  The  point  is 
of  importance  in  Keats's  history,  for  hence,  as  we  shall 
see  in  the  sequel,  came  probably  a  part  at  least  of  the 
peculiar  and  as  it  might  seem  paradoxical  rancour  with 
which  the  genial  Hunt,  and  Keats  as  his  friend  and 
supposed  follower,  were  by-and-by  to  be  persecuted  in 
Blackwood. 

When  Hunt's  ordeal  was  over  in  the  first  days  of 
February  1815,  he  issued  from  it  a  butt  for  savage  and 
vindictive  obloquy  to  the  reactionary  half  of  the  lettered 
world,  but  little  less  than  a  hero  and  martyr  to  the 
reforming  half.  He  retained  the  private  friendship  of 
many  of  those  w^ho  had  sought  him  out  from  public 
sympathy.  Tall,  straight,  slender,  charmingly  courteous 
and  vivacious,  with  glossy  black  hair,  bright  jet-black 
eyes,  full,  relishing  nether  lip,  and  'nose  of  taste,' 
Leigh  Hunt  was  one  of  the  most  winning  of  companions. 


46      HUNT'S  PERSONALITY  AND  CHARM 

fxill  of  kindly  smiles  and  jests,  of  reading,  gaiety,  and 
ideas,  with  an  infinity  of  pleasant  things  to  say  of  his 
own  and  a  beautiful  caressing  voice  to  say  them  in,  yet 
the  most  sympathetic  and  deferential  of  listeners.  To 
the  misfortune  of  himself  and  his  friends,  he  had  no 
notion  of  even  attempting  to  balance  income  and  expen- 
diture, and  was  perfectly  light-hearted  in  the  matter 
of  money  obligations,  which  he  shrank  neither  from 
receiving  nor  conferring, — only  circumstances  made  him 
almost  invariably  a  receiver.  But  men  of  sterner  fibre 
and  better  able  to  order  their  affairs  have  often  been 
much  more  ready  than  he  was  to  sacrifice  conviction 
to  advantage,  and  his  friends  found  more  to  admire  in 
his  smiling  steadfastness  under  obloquy  and  persecution 
than  to  blame  in  his  chronic  incapacity  to  pay  his  way. 
Hardly  anyone  had  warmer  well-wishers  or  requited 
them,  so  far  as  the  depth  of  his  nature  went,  with  truer 
loyalty  and  kindness.  His  industry  as  a  writer  was 
incessant,  hardly  less  than  that  of  Southey  himself. 
The  titles  he  gave  to  the  several  journals  he  conducted. 
The  Examiner  J  The  Reflector,  The  Indicator ,  define 
accurately  enough  his  true  vocation  as  a  guide  to  the 
pleasures  of  literature.  His  manner  in  criticism  has 
at  its  best  an  easy  penetration,  and  flowing  unobtrusive 
felicity,  most  remote  from  those  faults  to  which  De 
Quincey  and  even  the  illustrious  Coleridge,  with  their 
more  philosophic  powers  and  method,  were  subject, 
the  faults  of  roundaboutness  and  over-laboured  pro- 
fundity. 

The  weakness  of  Leigh  Hunt's  style  is  of  an  opposite 
kind.  'Matchless,'  according  to  Lamb's  well-known 
phrase,  'as  a  fire-side  companion,'  it  was  his  misfortune 
to  carry  too  much  of  a  fire-side  or  parlour  tone,  and 
sometimes,  it  must  be  owned,  a  very  second-rate  parlour 
tone,  into  literature.  He  could  not  walk  by  the  advice 
of  Polonius,  and  in  aiming  at  the  familiar  was  apt,  rarely 
in  prose  but  sadly  often  in  verse,  to  slip  into  an  under- 
bred strain  of  airy  and  genteel  vulgarity,  hard  to  recon- 
cile with  what  we  are  told  of  his  acceptable  social 


Pl.  II 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT 

FROM  A\  ENGRAVING  BY  MAYER  AFTER  J.  HAYTER 


J 


HIS  IDEAS  OF  POETICAL  REFORM        47 

qualities  in  real  life.^  He  was  as  enthusiastic  a  student 
of  our  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  century  Hterature  as 
Coleridge  or  Lamb,  and  though  he  had  more  appreciation 
than  they  of  the  characteristic  excellencies  of  what  he 
always  persists  in  caUing  the  ^French  school/  the  school 
of  polished  artifice  and  convention  which  came  in  after 
Dryden  and  swore  by  the  precepts  of  Boileau,  he  was 
not  less  bent  on  seeing  it  overthrown.  In  Enghsh 
poetry  his  predilection  was  for  the  older  writers  from 
Chaucer  to  Dryden,  and  above  all  others  for  Spenser: 
in  Italian  for  Boiardo,  Ariosto,  Pulci  and  the  later  writers 
of  the  chivalrous-fanciful  epic  style.  He  insisted  that 
such  writers  were  much  better  models  for  English  poets 
to  follow  than  the  French,  and  fought  as  hard  as  anyone 
for  the  return  of  English  poetry  from  the  urbane  con- 
ventions of  the  eighteenth  century  to  the  paths  of 
nature  and  of  freedom.  But  he  had  his  own  conception 
of  the  manner  in  which  this  return  should  be  effected. 
He  did  not  admit  that  Wordsworth  with  his  rustic 
simplicities  and  his  recluse  philosophy  had  solved  the 
problem.  ^It  was  his  intention/  he  wrote  in  prison, 
*by  the  beginning  of  next  year  to  bring  out  a  piece  of 
some  length  ...  in  which  he  would  attempt  to  reduce 
to  practice  his  own  ideas  of  what  is  natural  in  style, 
and  of  the  various  and  legitimate  harmony  of  the 
English  heroic'  The  result  of  this  intention  was  the 
Story  of  Rimini,  begun  before  his  prosecution  and 
pubHshed  a  year  after  his  release,  in  February  or 
March,  1816.  'With  the  endeavom*,'  so  he  repeated 
himself  in  the  preface,  'to  recur  to  a  freer  spirit 
of    versification,    I    have    joined    one    of    stiU    greater 

1  Both  Byron  and  Barry  Cornwall  have  expressed  their  sense  of  contrast 
between  certain  vulgarities  of  Hunt's  diction  and  his  personal  good 
breeding.  Byron  before  their  quarrel  declared  emphatically  that  he  was 
*not  a  vulgar  man';  and  Barry  Cornwall,  admitting  that  he  'indulged 
himself  occasionally  in  pet  words,  some  of  which  struck  me  as  almost 
approaching  to  the  vulgar,'  goes  on  to  say  that  *he  was  essentially  a 
gentleman  in  conduct,  in  demeanour,  in  manner,  in  his  consideration  for 
others,'  and  to  praise  him  for  his  'great  fund  of  positive  active  kindness,' 
his  freedom  from  all  irritable  vanity,  his  pleasure  and  Uberality  in  praising 
(Bryan  Walter  Procter,  An  Autobiographical  Fragment,  1877,  pp.  197-200). 


48  THE  STORY  OF  RIMINI 

importance, — that  of  having  a  free  and  idiomatic  cast 
of  language/ 

We  shall  have  to  consider  Hunt's  effort  to  revive  the 
old  freedom  of  the  English  heroic  metre  when  we  come 
to  the  study  of  Keats's  first  volume,  written  much  under 
Hunt's  influence.  As  to  his  success  with  his  'ideas  of 
what  is  natural  in  style,'  and  his  free  and  idiomatic — or 
as  he  elsewhere  says  'unaffected,  contemporaneous' — 
cast  of  language  to  supersede  the  styles  alike  of  Pope 
and  Wordsworth,  let  us  take  a  sample  of  Rimini  at  its 
best  and  worst.  Relating  the  gradual  obsession  of 
Paolo's  thoughts  by  'the  charm  of  his  sister-in-law, — 

And  she  became  companion  of  his  thought; 
Silence  her  gentleness  before  him  brought. 
Society  her  sense,  reading  her  books. 
Music  her  voice,  every  sweet  thing  her  looks, 
Which  sometimes  seemed,  when  he  sat  fixed  awhile. 
To  steal  beneath  his  eyes  with  upward  smile; 
And  did  he  stroll  into  some  lonely  place. 
Under  the  trees,  upon  the  thick  soft  grass. 
How  charming,  would  he  think,  to  see  her  here  I 
How  heightened  then,  and  perfect  would  appear 
The  two  divinest  things  this  world  has  got, 
A  lovely  woman  in  a  rural  spot ! 

The  first  few  lines  are  skilfully  modulated,  and  in  an 
ordinary  domestic  theme  might  be  palatable  enough; 
but  what  a  couplet,  good  heavens!  for  the  last.  At 
the  cHmax,  Hunt's  version  of  Dante  is  an  example  of 
milk-and-water  in  conditions  where  milk-and-water  is 
sheer  poison: — 

As  thus  they  sat,  and  felt  with  leaps  of  heart 
Their  colour  change,  they  came  upon  the  part 
Where  fond  Genevra,  with  her  flame  long  nurst. 
Smiled  upon  Launcelot  when  he  kissed  her  first: — 
That  touch,  at  last,  through  every  fibre  slid; 
And  Paolo  turned,  scarce  knowing  what  he  did. 
Only  he  feh  he  could  no  more  dissemble. 
And  kissed  her,  mouth  to  mouth,  all  in  a  tremble. 

The  taste,  we  see,  which  guided  Hunt  so  well  in 
appreciating   the   work    of   others    could    betray   him 


ITS  POPULARITY  49 

terribly  in  original  composition.  The  passages  of  Kght 
narrative  in  Rimini  are  often  vivacious  and  pleasant 
enough,  those  of  nature  description  genuinely  if  not 
profoundly  felt,  and  written  with  an  eye  on  the  object: 
but  they  are  the  only  tolerable  things  in  the  poem.  Hunt's 
idea  of  a  true  poetical  style  was  to  avoid  everything 
strained,  stilted,  and  conventional,  and  to  lighten  the 
stress  of  his  theme  with  familiar  graces  and  pleasantries 
in  the  manner  of  his  beloved  Ariosto.  But  he  did  not 
realise  that  while  any  style,  from  that  of  the  Book  of  Job 
to  that  of  Wordsworth's  Idiot  Boy,  may  become  poetical 
if  only  there  is  strength  and  intensity  of  feeling  behind 
it,  nothing  but  the  finest  social  instinct  and  tradition 
can  impart  the  tact  for  such  light  conversational  graces 
as  he  attempted,  and  that  to  treat  a  theme  of  high  tragic 
passion  in  the  tone  and  vocabulary  of  a  suburban  tea- 
party  is  intolerable.  Contemporaries,  welcoming  as  a 
relief  any  change  from  the  stale  conventions  and  tar- 
nished glitter  of  eighteenth-century  poetic  rhythm  and 
diction,  and  perhaps  sated  for  the  moment  with  the  rush 
and  thrill  of  new  romantic  and  exotic  sensation  they 
had  owed  in  recent  years,  first  to  Scott's  metrical  tales 
of  the  Border  and  the  Highlands,  then  to  Byron's  of 
Greece  and  the  Levant, — contemporaries  found  some- 
thing fresh  and  homefelt  in  Leigh  Hunt's  Riminiy  and 
sentimental  ladies  and  gentlemen  wept  over  the  sorrows 
of  the  hero  and  heroine  as  though  they  had  been  their 
own.  No  less  a  person  than  Byron,  to  whom  the  poem 
was  dedicated,  writes  to  Moore: — 'Leigh  Hunt's  poem 
is  a  devilish  good  one — quaint  here  and  there,  but  with 
the  substratum  of  originality,  and  with  poetry  about 
it  that  will  stand  the  test.  I  do  not  say  this  because 
he  has  inscribed  it  to  me.'  And  to  Leigh  Hunt  himself 
Byron  reports  praise  of  the  poem  from  Sir  Henry  Engle- 
iield  the  dilettante,  'a  mighty  man  in  the  blue  circles, 
and  a  very  clever  man  anywhere,'  from  Hookham  Frere 
'and  all  the  arch  literati,''  and  says  how  he  had  left  his 
own  sister  and  cousin  'in  fixed  and  delighted  perusal 
of  it.'    Byron's  admiration  cooled  greatly  in  the  sequel. 


50  DANTE  AND  NAMBY-PAMBY  ' 

with  or  even  before  the  cooling  of  his  regard  for  the 
author.  But  it  is  an  instructive  comment  on  standards 
of  taste  and  their  instabihty  that  cultivated  readers 
should  at  any  time  have  endured  to  hear  the  story  of 
Paolo  and  Francesca — Dante's  Paolo  and  Francesca — 
diluted  through  four  cantos  in  a  style  like  that  of  the 
above  quotations.  When  Keats  and  Shelley,  with  their 
immeasurably  finer  poetical  gifts  and  instincts,  succes- 
sively followed  Leigh  Hunt  in  the  attempt  to  add  a 
familiar  ease  of  manner  to  variety  of  movement  in 
this  metre,  Shelley,  it  need  not  be  said,  was  in  no  danger 
of  falling  into  HunT^'s  faults  of  triviality  and  under- 
breeding:  but  Keats  was  only  too  apt  to  be  betrayed 
into  them. 

Hunt  had  spent  the  first  months  after  his  release  in 
London,  but  by  the  end  of  1815,  some  time  before  the 
publication  of  Rimini,  had  settled  at  Hampstead,  where 
he  soon  made  himself  a  sort  of  self-crowned  laureate  of 
the  beauties  of  the  place,  and  continued  to  vary  his 
critical  and  political  labours  with  gossiping  compH- 
mentary  verses  to  his  friends  in  the  form  both  of  sonnet 
and  epistle.  The  gravest  of  the  epistles  is  one  addressed 
in  a  spirit  of  good-hearted  loyalty  to  Byron  in  that 
disastrous  April  when,  after  four  years  spent  in  the 
full  blaze  of  popularity  and  fashion,  he  was  leaving 
England  under  the  storm  of  obloquy  aroused  by  the 
scandf^ls  attending  his  separation  from  his  wife.  This 
is  in  Hunt's  refoniied  heroic  couplet:  the  rest  are  in 
a  chirruping  and  gossiping  anapaestic  sing-song  which 
is  perhaps  the  writer's  most  congenial  vein.  Here  is  a 
summer  picture  of  Hampstead  from  a  letter  to  Tom 
Moore : — 

And  yet  how  can  I  touch,  and  not  linger  a  while, 
On  the  spot  that  has  haunted  my  youth  Hke  a  smile  ? 
On  its  fine  breathing  prospects,  its  clump-wooded  glades, 
Dark  pines,  and  white  houses,  and  long-allied  shades. 
With  fields  going  down,  where  the  bard  lies  and  sees 
The  hills  up  above  him  with  roofs  in  the  trees  ? 
Now  too,  while  the  season, — half  summer,  half  spring, — 
Brown  elms  and  green  oaks, — makes  one  loiter  and  sing; 


HUNT'S  LIFE  AT  HAMPSTEAD  51 

And  the  bee's  weighty  murmur  comes  by  us  at  noon. 
And  the  cuckoo  repeats  his  short  indolent  tune, 
And  Httle  white  clouds  lie  about  in  the  sun, 
And  the  wind's  in  the  west,  and  hay-making  begun  ? — 

and  here  an  autumn  night-sketch,  from  a  letter  expressing 
surprise  that  the  wet  weather  has  not  brought  a  visit 
from  Charles  Lamb,  that  inveterate  lover  of  walking  in 
the  rain : — 

We  hadn't  much  thunder  and  lightning,  I  own; 

But  the  rains  might  have  led  you  to  walk  out  of  town; 

And  what  made  us  think  your  desertion  still  stranger. 

The  roads  were  so  bad,  there  was  really  no  danger; 

At  least  where  I  live;  for  the  nights  were  so  groping. 

The  rains  made  such  wet,  and  the  paths  are  so  sloping. 

That  few,  unemboldened  by  youth  or  by  drinking. 

Came  down  without  lanthoms, — nor  then  without  shrinking. 

And  really,  to  see  the  bright  spots  come  and  go. 

As  the  path  rose  or  fell,  was  a  fanciful  shew. 

Like  fairies  they  seemed,  pitching  up  from  their  nooks, 

And  twinkling  upon  us  their  bright  little  looks. 

Such  were  Leigh  Hunt's  antecedents,  and  such  his 
literary  performances  and  reputation,  when  Keats  at 
the  age  of  twenty-one  became  his  intimate.  So  far  as 
opinions  and  public  sympathies  were  concerned,  those  of 
Keats  had  already,  as  we  have  seen,  been  largely  formed 
in  boyhood  by  familiarity,  under  the  lead  of  Cowden 
Clarke,  with  Leigh  Hunt's  writings  in  the  Examiner. 
Hunt  was  a  confirmed  Voltairian  and  sceptic  as  to 
revealed  religion,  and  suppKed  its  place  with  a  private 
gospel  of  cheerfulness,  or  system  of  sentimental  optimism, 
inspired  partly  by  his  own  invincibly  sunny  temperament 
and  partly  by  the  hopeful  doctrines  of  eighteenth-century 
philosophy  in  France.  Keats  shared  the  natural  sym- 
pathy of  generous  youth  for  Hunt's  liberal  and  kind- 
hearted  view  of  things,  and  he  had  a  mind  naturally 
unapt  for  dogma:  ready  to  entertain  and  appreciate 
any  set  of  ideas  according  as  his  imagination  recognised 
their  beauty  or  power,  he  could  never  wed  himself  to 
any    as    representing   ultimate    truth.     In    matters    of 


52  HUNT  AND  KEATS  COMPARED 

poetic  feeling  and  fancy  the  two  men  had  up  to  a  certain 
point  not  a  little  in  common.  Like  Hunt,  Keats  at 
this  time  was  given  to  'luxuriating^  too  effusively  and 
fondly  over  the  'deliciousness'  of  whatever  he  liked  in 
art,  books,  or  nature.  To  the  every-day  pleasures  of 
summer  and  the  English  fields  Himt  brought  in  a  lower 
degree  the  same  alertness  of  perception  and  acuteness 
of  enjoyment  which  in  Keats  were  intense  beyond 
parallel.  In  his  lighter  and  shallower  way  Hunt  also 
truly  felt  with  Keats  the  perennial  charm  and  vitality 
of  classic  fable,  and  was  scholar  enough  to  produce 
about  this  time  some  agreeable  translations  of  the 
Sicilian  pastorals,  and  some,  less  adequate,  of  Homer. 
But  behind  such  pleasant  faculties  in  Hmit  nothing 
deeper  or  more  potent  lay  hidden.  Whereas  with 
Keats,  as  time  went  on,  delighted  sensation  became 
more  and  more  surely  and  instantaneously  transmuted 
and  spiritualised  into  imaginative  emotion;  his  words 
and  cadences  came  every  day  from  deeper  sources 
within  him  and  more  fully  charged  with  the  power  of 
far-reaching  and  symbolic  suggestion.  Hence,  as  this 
profound  and  passionate  young  genius  grew,  he  could 
not  but  be  aware  of  what  was  shallow  in  the  talent  of 
his  senior  and  cloying  and  distasteful  in  his  ever-voluble 
geniality.  But  for  many  months  the  harmony  of  their 
relations  was  complete. 

The  'little  cottage'  in  the  Vale  of  Health  must  have 
been  fairly  overcrowded,  one  would  suppose,  with  Hunt's 
fast-growing  family  of  young  children,  but  a  bed  was 
made  up  for  Keats  on  a  sofa,  'in  a  parlour  no  bigger 
than  an  old  mansion's  closet,'  says  Hunt,  which  never- 
theless served  him  for  a  library  and  had  prints  after 
Stothard  hung  on  the  walls  and  casts  of  the  heads  of 
poets  and  heroes  crowning  the  bookshelves.  Here  the 
young  poet  was  made  always  welcome.  The  sonnet 
beginning  'Keen,  fitful  gusts  are  whispering  here  and 
there'  records  a  night  of  October  or  November  1816, 
when,  instead  of  staying  to  sleep,  he  preferred  to  walk 
home  under  the  stars,  his  head  full  of  talk  about  Petrarch 


KEATS  AT  HUNT'S  COTTAGE  53 

and  the  youth  of  Milton,  to  the  city  lodgings  where  he 
Uved  with  his  brothers  the  life  affectionately  described 
in  that  other  pleasant  sonnet  written  on  Tom's  birth- 
day, November  18,  beginning  ^  Small,  busy  flames 
play  through  the  fresh-laid  coals/  The  well-known 
fifty  lines  at  the  end  of  Sleep  and  Poetry ,  a  poem  on  which 
Keats  put  forth  the  best  of  his  half-fledged  strength  this 
winter,  give  the  fullest  and  most  engaging  account  of 
the  pleasure  and  inspiration  he  drew  from  Hunt's 
hospitality : — 


The  chimes 
Of  friendly  voices  had  just  given  place 
To  as  sweet  a  silence,  when  I  'gan  retrace 
The  pleasant  day,  upon  a  couch  at  ease. 
It  was  a  poet's  house  who  keeps  the  keys 
Of  pleasure's  temple.     Round  about  were  hung 
The  glorious  features  of  the  bards  who  sung 
In  other  ages — cold  and  sacred  busts 
Smiled  at  each  other.     Happy  he  who  trusts 
To  clear  Futurity  his  darling  fame  ! 
Then  there  were  fauns  and  satyrs  taking  aim 
At  swelling  apples  with  a  frisky  leap 
And  reaching  fingers,  'mid  a  luscious  heap 
Of  vine-leaves.     Then  there  rose  to  view  a  fane 
Of  liny  marble,  and  thereto  a  train 
Of  nymphs  approaching  faMy  o'er  the  sward: 
One,  loveliest,  holding  her  white  hand  toward 
The  dazzling  sun-rise:  two  sisters  sweet 
Bending  their  graceful  figures  till  they  meet 
Over  the  trippings  of  a  little  child: 
And  some  are  hearing,  eagerly,  the  wild 
Thrilling  liquidity  of  dewy  piping. 
See,  in  another  picture,  nymphs  are  wiping 
Cherishingly  Diana's  timorous  limbs; — 
A  fold  of  lawny  mantle  dabbling  swims 
At  the  bath's  edge,  and  keeps  a  gentle  motion 
With  the  subsiding  crystal :  as  when  ocean 
Heaves  calmly  its  broad  swelling  smoothness  o'er 
Its  rocky  marge,  and  balances  once  more 
The  patient  weeds ;  that  now  unshent  by  foam 
Feel  all  about  their  undulating  home  .  .  . 
Petrarch,  outstepping  from  the  shady  green. 
Starts  at  the  sight  of  Laura;  nor  can  wean 


54  PRINTS  IN  THE  LIBRARY 

His  eyes  from  her  sweet  face.     Most  happy  they ! 

For  over  them  was  seen  a  free  display 

Of  out-spread  wings,  and  from  between  them  shone 

The  face  of  Poesy :  from  off  her  throne 

She  overlooked  things  that  I  scarce  could  tell. 

It  is  easy  from  the  above  and  from  some  of  Keats^s 
later  work  to  guess  at  most  of  the  prints  which  had 
caught  his  attention  on  Hunt's  walls  and  in  his  port- 
folios and  worked  on  his  imagination  afterwards : — Pous- 
sin's  'Empire  of  Flora'  for  certain:  several,  probably, 
of  his  various  'Bacchanals/  with  the  god  and  his  leopard- 
drawn  car,  and  groups  of  nymphs  dancing  with  fauns 
or  strewn  upon  the  foreground  to  right  or  left :  the  same 
artist's  'Venus  and  Adonis':  Stothard's  'Bathers'  and 
'Vintage,'  his  small  print  of  Petrarch  as  a  youth  first 
meeting  Laura  and  her  friend;  Raphael's  'Poetry' 
from  the  Vatican;  and  so  forth.  These  things  are  not 
without  importance  in  the  study  of  Keats,  for  he  was 
quicker  and  more  apt  than  any  of  our  other  poets  to 
draw  inspiration  from  works  of  art, — prints,  pictures,  or 
marbles, — ^that  came  under  his  notice,  and  it  is  not  for 
nothing  that  he  alludes  in  this  same  poem  to 

— the  pleasant  flow 
Of  words  on  opening  a  portfolio. 

A  whole  treatise  might  be  written  on  matters  which  I 
shall  have  to  mention  briefly  or  not  at  all, — ^how  such 
and  such  a  descriptive  phrase  in  Keats  has  been  sug- 
gested by  this  or  that  figure  in  a  picture;  how  pictures  by 
or  prints  after  old  masters  have  been  partly  responsible 
for  his  vision  alike  of  the  Indian  maiden  and  the  blind 
Orion;  what  various  originals,  paintings  or  antiques  or 
both,  we  can  recognize  as  blending  themselves  into  his 
evocation  of  the  triumph  of  Bacchus  or  his  creation  of 
the  Grecian  Urn. 

On  December  the  1st,  1816,  Hunt,  as  has  been  said, 
did  Keats  the  new  service  of  printing  the  Chapman 
sonnet  as  a  specimen  of  his  work  in  an  essay  in  the 
Examiner  on  'Young  Poets,'  in  which  the  names  of 
Shelley  and  Reynolds  were  bracketed  with  his  as  poetical 


THE  INTERCORONATION  SCENE  55 

beginners  of  high  promise.  With  reference  to  the  custom 
mentioned  by  Hunt  of  Keats  and  himself  sitting  down 
of  an  evening  to  write  verses  on  a  given  subject,  Cowden 
Clarke  pleasantly  describes  one  such  occasion  on  Decem- 
ber 30  of  the  same  year,  when  the  chosen  theme  was 
The  Grasshopper  and  the  Cricket: — ^  The  event  of  the 
after  scrutiny  was  one  of  many  such  occurrences  which 
have  riveted  the  memory  of  Leigh  Hunt  in  my  affec- 
tionate regard  and  admiration  for  unaffected  generosity 
and  perfectly  unpretentious  encouragement.  His  sincere 
look  of  pleasure  at  the  first  line: — 

The  poetry  of  earth  is  never  dead. 

'^Such  a  prosperous  opening!"  he  said;  and  when  he 
came  to  the  tenth  and  eleventh  lines: — 

On  a  lone  winter  morning,  when  the  frost 
Hath  wrought  a  silence — 

"Ah  that's  perfect !  Bravo  Keats ! ''  And  then  he  went 
on  in  a  dilatation  on  the  dumbness  of  Nature  during  the 
season's  suspension  and  torpidity.'  The  affectionate 
enthusiasm  of  the  younger  and  the  older  man  (himself, 
be  it  remembered,  little  over  thirty)  for  one  another's 
company  and  verses  sometimes  took  forms  which  to  the 
mind  of  the  younger  and  wiser  of  the  two  soon  came 
to  seem  ridiculous.  One  day  in  early  spring  (1817)  the 
whim  seized  them  over  their  wine  to  crown  themselves 
'sdter  the  manner  of  the  elder  bards.'  Keats  crowned 
Hunt  with  a  wreath  of  ivy.  Hunt  crowned  Keats  with 
a  wreath  of  laurel,  and  each  while  sitting  so  adorned 
wrote  a  pair  of  sonnets  expressive  of  his  feelings.  While 
they  were  in  the  act  of  composition,  it  seems,  three 
lady  callers  came  in — conceivably  the  three  Misses 
Reynolds,  of  whom  we  shall  hear  more  anon,  Jane, 
afterwards  Mrs  Thomas  Hood,  Mariane,  and  their  yoimg 
sister  Charlotte.  When  visitors  were  announced  Hunt 
took  off  his  wreath  and  suggested  that  Keats  should  do 
the  same:  he,  however,  'in  his  enthusiastic  way, 
declared  he  would  not  take  off  his  crown  for  any  human 


56  SONNETS  OF  HUNT  TO  KEATS 

being/  and  accordingly  wore  it  as  long  as  the  visit  lasted.^ 
Here  are  Hunt's  pair  of  sonnets,  which  are  about  as  good 
as  any  he  ever  wrote,  and  which  he  not  long  afterwards 
printed : — 

A  crown  of  ivy !    I  submit  my  head  J 

To  the  young  hand  that  gives  it, — ^young,  'tis  true. 
But  with  a  right,  for  'tis  a  poet's  too. 

How  pleasant  the  leaves  feel !  and  how  they  spread 

With  their  broad  angles,  like  a  nodding  shed 
Over  both  eyes !  and  how  complete  and  new. 
As  on  my  hand  I  lean,  to  feel  them  strew 

My  sense  with  freshness, — Fancy's  rusthng  bed ! 

Tress-tossing  girls,  with  smell  of  flowers  and  grapes 
Come  dancing  by,  and  downward  piping  cheeks. 
And  up-thrown  cymbals,  and  Silenus  old 

Lumpishly  borne,  and  many  trampling  shapes, — 
And  lastly,  with  his  bright  eyes  on  her  bent, 
Bacchus, — ^whose  bride  has  of  his  hand  fast  hold. 

It  is  a  lofty  feeling,  yet  a  kind. 

Thus  to  be  topped  with  leaves; — to  have  a  sense 

Of  honour-shaded  thought, — an  influence 
As  from  great  Nature's  fingers,  and  be  twined 
With  her  old,  sacred,  verdurous  ivy-bind. 

As  though  she  hallowed  with  that  sylvan  fence 

A  head  that  bows  to  her  benevolence. 
Midst  pomp  of  fancied  trumpets  in  the  wind. 
'Tis  what's  within  us  crowned.     And  kind  and  great 

Are  all  the  conquering  wishes  it  inspires, — 
Love  of  things  lasting,  love  of  the  tall  woods. 
Love  of  love's  self,  and  ardour  for  a  state 

Of  natural  good  befitting  such  desires. 

Towns  without  gain,  and  haunted  solitudes. 


Keats  had  the  good  sense  not  to  print  his  efforts  of  the 
day;  they  are  of  slight  account  poetically,  but  have  a 
real  biographical  interest: — 

*  This  reconstruction  of  the  scene  is  founded  on  a  comparison  of  the 
sonnets  themselves  with  Woodhouse's  note  on  Keats's  subsequent  palinode, 
A  Hymn  to  Apollo.  Woodhouse  says  the  friends  were  both  crowned  with 
laurel,  but  it  seems  more  likely  that  he  should  have  made  this  mistake 
than  that  a  similar  performance  should  have  been  twice  repeated 
(Houghton  MSS.). 


SONNETS  OF  KEATS  TO  HUNT  57 

ON  RECEIVING  A  LAUREL  CROWN   FROM   LEIGH  HUNT 

Minutes  are  flying  swiftly,  and  as  yet 

Nothing  unearthly  has  enticed  my  brain 

Into  a  delphic  labyrinth — I  would  fain 
Catch  an  immortal  thought  to  pay  the  debt 
I  owe  to  the  kind  poet  who  has  set 

Upon  my  ambitious  head  a  glorious  gain. 

Two  bending  laurel  sprigs — 'tis  nearly  pain 
To  be  conscious  of  such  a  coronet. 
Still  time  is  fleeting,  and  no  dream  arises 

Gorgeous  as  I  would  have  it — only  I  see 
A  trampling  down  of  what  the  world  most  prizes, 

Turbans  and  crowns  and  blank  regality; 
And  then  I  run  into  most  wild  surmises 

Of  all  the  many  glories  that  may  be. 


TO  THE   LADIES  WHO   SAW  ME  CROWNED 

What  is  there  in  the  universal  earth 

More  lovely  than  a  wreath  from  the  bay  tree  ? 
Haply  a  halo  round  the  moon — a  glee 

Circling  from  three  sweet  pair  of  lips  in  mirth; 

And  haply  you  will  say  the  dewy  birth 
Of  morning  roses — cripplings  tenderly 
Spread  by  the  halcyon's  breast  upon  the  sea — 

But  these  comparisons  are  nothing  worth. 

Then  there  is  nothing  in  the  world  so  fair  ? 
The  silvery  tears  of  April  ?    Youth  of  May  ? 
Or  June  that  breathes  out  life  for  butterflies  ? 

No,  none  of  these  can  from  my  favourite  bear 
Away  the  palm — yet  shall  it  ever  pay 

Due  reverence  to  your  most  sovereign  eyes. 

Here  we  have  expressed  in  the  first  sonnet  the  same 
mood  as  in  some  of  the  hoHday  rimes  of  the  previous 
summer,  the  mood  of  ardent  expectancy  for  an  inspira- 
tion that  dechnes  (and  no  wonder  considering  the 
circimistances)  to  come.  It  was  natural  that  the  call 
for  an  impromptu  should  bring  up  phrases  already  lying 
formed  or  half  formed  in  Keats's  mind,  and  the  sestet 
of  this  sonnet  is  interesting  as  containing  in  its  first 
four  lines  the  germs  of  the  well-known  passage  at 
the  beginning  of  the  third  book  of  Endymion, — 


58  KEATS'S  PENITENCE 

There  are  who  lord  it  o'er  their  fellow-men 
With  most  prevailing  tinsel — 

and  in  its  fifth  a  repetition  of  the  'wild  surmise'  phrase 
of  the  Chapman  sonnet.  The  second  sonnet  has  a 
happy  line  or  two  in  its  list  of  dehghts,  and  its  openiag 
is  noticeable  as  repeating  the  interrogative  formula  of 
the  opening  lines  of  Sleep  and  Poetry,  Keats's  chief 
venture  in  verse  this  winter. 

Very  soon  after  the  date  of  this  scene  of  intercoronation 
(the  word  is  Hunt's,  used  on  a  different  occasion)  Keats 
became  heartily  ashamed  of  it,  and  expressed  his  peni- 
tence in  a  strain  of  ranting  verse  (his  own  name  for 
compositions  in  this  vein)  under  the  form  of  a  hymn  or 
palinode  to  Apollo: — 

God  of  the  golden  bow, 

And  of  the  golden  lyre. 
And  of  the  golden  hair. 

And  of  the  golden  fire. 
Charioteer 
1  Of  the  patient  year. 

Where — where  slept  thine  ire. 
When  like  a  blank  idiot  I  put  on  thy  wreath. 

Thy  laurel,  thy  glory. 

The  light  of  thy  story. 
Or  was  I  a  worm — too  low  crawling,  for  death  ? 

O  Delphic  Apollo ! 

And  SO  forth:  the  same  half-amused  spirit  of  penitence 
is  expressed  in  a  letter  of  a  few  weeks  later  to  his  brother 
George:  and  later  still  he  came  to  look  back,  with  a 
smile  of  manly  self-derision,  on  those  days  as  a  time 
when  he  had  been  content  to  play  the  pa^  of  'A  pet- 
lamb  in  a  sentimental  farce.' 


CHAPTER  III 

WINTER  1816-1817:    HAYDON:    OTHER  NEW  FRIENDSHIPS: 
THE   DIE  CAST  FOR  POETRY 

Haydon  and  the  Elgin  marbles — Haydon  as  painter  and  writer — ^Vanity, 
pugnacity,  and  piety — Haydon  on  Leigh  Hunt — Keats  and  Haydon 
meet — An  enthusiastic  friendship — Keats  and  the  Elgin  marbles — 
Sonnets  and  protestations — HazHtt  and  Lamb — Friendship  of  Hunt 
and  Shelley — Lamb  and  HazHtt  on  Shelley — Haydon  and  Shelley: 
a  battle  royal — Keats  and  SheUey — A  cool  relation — John  Hamilton 
Reynolds — His  devotion  to  Keats — The  Reynolds  sisters — James  Rice 
— Charles  Wells — WiUiam  Haslam — Joseph  Severn — Keats  judged  by 
his  circle — Described  by  Severn — His  range  of  sympathies — His  poetic 
ambition — The  die  is  cast — First  volume  goes  to  press. 

So  much  for  the  relations  of  Keats  with  Hunt  himself 
in  these  first  six  months  of  their  intimacy.  Next  of  the 
other  intimacies  which  he  formed  with  friends  to  whom 
Himt  introduced  him.  One  of  the  first  of  these,  and 
for  a  while  the  most  stimulating  and  engrossing,  was 
with  the  painter  Haydon.  This  remarkable  man,  now 
just  thirty,  had  lately  been  victorious  in  one  of  the  two 
great  objects  of  his  ambition,  and  had  achieved  a  tem- 
porary semblance  of  victory  in  the  other.  For  the  last 
eight  years  he  had  fought  and  laboured  to  win  national 
recognition  for  the  deserts  of  Lord  Elgin  in  his  great 
work  of  salvage — for  such  under  the  conditions  of  the 
time  it  was — ^in  bringing  away  the  remains  of  the 
Parthenon  sculptures  from  Athens.  By  dint  of  sheer 
justice  of  conviction  and  power  of  fight,  and  then 
only  when  he  had  been  reinforced  in  the  campaign  by 
foreigners  of  indisputable  authority  like  the  archaeologist 
Visconti  and  the  sculptor  Canova,  he  had  succeeded  in 
getting  the  pre-eminence  of  these  marbles  among  all 

59 


60     HAYDON  AND  THE  ELGIN  MARBLES 

works  of  the  sculptor's  art  acknowledged,  and  their 
acquisition  for  the  nation  secured,  in  the  teeth  of  powerful 
and  bitterly  hostile  cliques.  His  opponents  included 
both  the  sentimentalists  who  took  their  cue  from  Byron's 
Curse  of  Minerva  in  shrieking  at  Elgin  as  a  vandal,  and 
the  dilettanti  who,  blinded  to  the  true  Greek  touch  by 
famiharity  with  smoothed  and  pumiced  Roman  copies, 
had  declared  the  Parthenon  sculptures  to  be  works  of 
the  age  of  Hadrian. 

Haydon's  victory  over  these  antagonists  is  his  chief 
title,  and  a  title  both  sound  and  strong,  to  the  regard 
of  posterity.  His  other  and  life-long,  half  insane  en- 
deavour was  to  persuade  the  world  to  take  him  at  his 
own  estimate,  as  the  man  chosen  by  Providence  to  add 
the  crown  of  heroic  painting  to  the  other  glories  of  his 
country.  His  high-flaming  energy  and  industry,  his 
eloquence,  vehemence,  and  social  gifts,  the  clamour  of 
his  indomitable  self-assertion  and  of  his  ceaseless  con- 
flict with  the  academic  powers,  even  his  unabashed 
claims  for  pecuniary  support  on  friends,  patrons,  and 
society  at  large,  had  won  for  him  much  convinced  or 
half  convinced  attention  and  encouragement,  both  in 
the  world  of  art  and  letters  and  in  that  of  dilettantism 
and  fashion.  His  first  and  second  great  pictures, 
'Dentatus'  and  ^Macbeth,' "had  been  dubiously  received; 
his  third,  the  'Judgment  of  Solomon,'  with  acclamation. 
This  had  been  finished  after  his  victory  in  the  matter 
of  the  Elgin  marbles.  He  was  now  busy  on  one  larger 
and  more  ambitious  than  all,  'Christ's  Entry  into 
Jerusalem,'  in  which  it  was  his  purpose  to  include 
among  the  crowd  of  lookers-on  portraits  of  many 
famous  men  both  historical  and  contemporary.  While 
as  usual  sunk  deep  in  debt,  he  was  perfectly  confident 
of  glory.  Vain  confidence — for  he  was  in  truth  a  man 
whom  nature  had  endowed,  as  if  maliciously,  with  one 
part  of  the  gifts  of  genius  and  not  the  other.  Its  energy 
and  voluntary  power  he  possessed  completely,  and  no 
man  has  ever  lived  at  a  more  genuinely  exalted  pitch 
of  feehng  and  aspiration.    'Never/  wrote  he  about  this 


HAYDON  AS  PAINTER  AND  WRITER      61 

time,  'have  I  had  such  irresistible  and  perpetual  urgings 
of  future  greatness.  I  have  been  like  a  man  with  air- 
balloons  under  his  armpits,  and  ether  in  his  soul.  While 
I  was  painting,  walking,  or  thinking,  beaming  flashes  of 
energy  followed  and  impressed  me.  .  .  .  They  came  over 
me,  and  shot  across  me,  and  shook  me,  till  I  lifted  up 
my  heart  and  thanked  God.'  But  for  all  his  sensations 
and  conviction  of  power,  the  other  half  of  genius,  the 
half  which  resides  not  in  energy  and  will,  but  in  faculties 
which  it  is  the  business  of  energy  and  will  to  apply,  was 
denied  to  Hay  don.  Its  vision  and  originality,  its  gift 
of  'heavenly  alchemy'  for  transmuting  and  new-creating 
the  materials  offered  it  by  experience,  its  sovereign 
inability  to  see  with  any  eyes  or  create  to  any  pattern 
but  its  own,  were  not  in  hun.  Except  for  a  stray  note 
here  and  there,  an  occasional  bold  conception,  a  trick 
of  colour  or  craftsmanship  not  too  obviously  caught 
from  greater  men,  the  pictures  with  which  he  exult- 
ingly  laid  siege  to  immortality  belong,  as  posterity  has 
justly  felt,  to  the  kingdom  not  of  true  great  art  but 
of  imitative  pictorial  posturing  and  empty  pictorial 
bombast. 

As  a  draughtsman  especially,  Haydon's  touch  is  sur- 
prisingly loose,  empty,  and  inexpressive.  Even  in 
drawing  from  the  Elgin  marbles,  as  he  did  with  passion- 
ate industry,  covering  reams,  he  fails  almost  wholly  to 
render  the  qualities  which  he  so  ardently  perceived,  and 
loses  every  distinction  and  every  subtlety  of  the  original.^ 
Infinitely  better  is  his  account  of  them  in  words:  for 
in  truth  Haydon's  chief  intellectual  power  was  as  an 
observer,  and  his  best  instrument  the  pen.  Readers 
of  his  journals  and  correspondence  know  how  vividly 
and  tellingly  he  can  relate  an  experience  or  touch  off 
a  character.  In  this  gift  of  striking  out  a  human  por- 
trait in  words  he  stood  second  in  his  age,  if  second,  to 
Hazlitt  alone,  and  in  our  later  literature  there  has  been 
no  one  to  beat  him  except  Carlyle.    But  passion  and 

1  These  drawings  are  preserved  in  the  Department  of  Prints  and  Drawings 
at  the  British  Museum. 


62        VANITY,  PUGNACITY,  AND  PIETY 

pugnacity,  vanity  and  the  spirit  of  self-exaltation,  at 
the  same  time  as  they  intensify  vision,  are  bound  to 
discolour  and  distort  it;  and  the  reader  must  always 
bear  in  mind  that  Haydon's  pen  portraits  of  his  con- 
temporaries are  apt  to  be  not  less  untrustworthy  than 
they  are  unforgettable.  Moreover  in  this,  the  literary, 
form  of  expression  also,  where  he  aims  higher,  leaving 
description  and  trying  to  become  imaginative  and 
impressive,  we  find  only  the  same  self-satisfied  void 
turgidity,  and  proof  of  spiritual  hoUowness  disguised  by 
temperamental  fervour,  as  in  his  paintings. 

But  it  was  the  gifts  and  faculties  which  Haydon 
possessed,  and  not  those  he  lacked,  it  was  the  ardour 
and  enthusiasm  of  his  character,  and  not  his  essential 
commonness  of  gift  and  faculty,  that  impressed  his 
associates  as  they  impressed  himself.  Sturdy,  loud- 
voiced,  eloquent,  high  of  colour,  with  a  bald  perpendi- 
cular forehead  surmounting  a  set  of  squarely  compressed, 
pugnacious  features, — eyes,  lips  and  jaw  all  prominent 
and  aggressive  together, — ^he  was  a  dominating,  and  yet 
a  welcome,  presence  in  some  of  the  choicest  circles  of 
his  day.  Wordsworth  and  Wordsworth's  firm  ally,  the 
painter-baronet  Sir  George  Beaumont,  Hazlitt,  Horace 
Smith,  Charles  Lamb,  Coleridge,  Walter  Scott,  Mary 
Mitford,  were  among  his  friends.  Some  of  them,  like 
Wordsworth,  held  by  him  always,  while  his  imperious 
and  importunate  egotism  wore  out  others  after  a  while. 
He  was  justly  proud  of  his  industry  and  strength  of 
purpose:  proud  also  of  his  religious  faith  and  piety, 
and  in  the  habit  of  thanking  his  maker  effusively  in 
set  terms  for  special  acts  of  favour  and  protection,  for 
this  or  that  happy  inspiration  in  a  picture,  for  deliver- 
ance from  'pecuniary  emergencies,'  and  the  like.  *I 
always  rose  up  from  my  knees,'  he  says  strikingly  in  a 
letter  to  Keats,  'with  a  refreshed  fury,  an  iron-clenched 
firmness,  a  crystal  piety  of  feeling  that  sent  me  streaming 
on  with  a  repulsive  power  against  the  troubles  of  life.' 
And  he  was  prone  to  hold  himself  up  as  a  model  to  his 
friends  in  both  particulars,  lecturing  them  loftily  on 


Pl.  Ill 


•r^€ 


BENJAMIN  ROBERT  HAYDON 

FROM    AN'     ENGRAVING    BY    THOMSON    AFTER    HAYDON 


HAYDON  ON   LEIGH  HUNT  63 

faith  and  conduct  while  he  was  hving  without  scruple 
on  their  bounty. 

In  October  1816;  the  first  month  of  Keats's  intimacy 
with  Hunt,  Haydon  also  made  a  short  stay  at  Hamp- 
stead.  He  and  Hunt  were  already  acquainted,  and 
Hunt  had  pubHshed  in  the  Examiner  the  very  able, 
cogent  and  pungent  letter  with  which  Haydon  a  few 
months  before  had  clenched  the  Elgin  marble  contro- 
versy and  practically  brought  it  to  an  end.  Hunt  had 
congratulated  Haydon  in  a  sonnet  on  the  occasion, 
closing  with  a  gentle  hint  that,  fine  as  such  a  victory 
was,  he  was  himself  devoted  to  a  mission  finer  still,  as 

One  of  the  spirits  chosen  by  heaven  to  turn 
The  sunny  side  of  things  to  human  eyes. 

Their  intercourse  was  now  warmly  resumed,  though 
never  without  latent  risk  of  antagonism  and  discord. 
The  following  letter  of  Haydon  to  Wilkie,  more  just  and 
temperate  than  usual,  is  good  for  filling  in  our  picture 
both  of  Hunt  and  of  Haydon  himself,  as  well  as  for 
adding  another  to  the  number  of  bewildering  contem- 
porary estimates  of  Rimini. 

27  October,  1816. 

I  have  been  at  Hampstead  this  fortnight  for  my  eyes,  and 
shall  return  with  my  body  much  stronger  for  application.  The 
greater  part  of  my  time  has  been  spent  in  Leigh  Hunt's  society, 
who  is  certainly  one  of  the  most  delightful  companions.  Full 
of  poetry  and  art,  and  amiable  humour,  we  argue  always  with 
full  hearts  on  everything  but  religion  and  Buonaparte,  and  we 
have  resolved  never  to  talk  of  these,  particularly  as  I  have  been 
recently  examining  Voltaire's  opinions  concerning  Christianity, 
and  turmoiling  my  head  to  ascertain  fully  my  right  to  put  him 
into  my  picture ! 

Though  Leigh  Hunt  is  not  deep  in  knowledge,  moral,  meta- 
physical, or  classical,  yet  he  is  intense  in  feeling,  and  has  an 
intellect  for  ever  on  the  alert.  He  is  like  one  of  those  instruments 
on  three  legs,  which,  throw  it  how  you  will,  always  pitches  on  two, 
and  has  a  spike  sticking  for  ever  up  and  ever  ready  for  you.  He 
'sets'  at  a  subject  with  a  scent  like  a  pointer.  He  is  a  remarkable 
man,  and  created  a  sensation  by  his  independence,  his  courage, 
his  disinterestedness  in  public  matters,  and  by  the  truth,  acute- 
ness,  and  taste  of  his  dramatic  criticisms  he  raised  the  rank  of 


64  KEATS  AND  HAYDON  MEET 

newspapers,  and  gave  by  his  example  a  literary  feeling  to  the 
weekly  ones  more  especially. 

As  a  poet,  I  think  him  full  of  the  genuine  feeling.  His  third 
canto  in  Rimini  is  equal  to  anything  in  any  language  of  that 
sweet  sort.  Perhaps  in  his  wishing  to  avoid  the  monotony  of 
the  Pope  school,  he  may  have  shot  into  the  other  extreme,  and 
his  invention  of  obscure  words  to  express  obscure  feelings  borders 
sometimes  on  affectation.  But  these  are  trifles  compared  with 
the  beauty  of  the  poem,  the  intense  painting  of  the  scenery,  and 
the  deep  burning  in  of  the  passion  which  trembles  in  every  line. 
Thus  far  as  a  critic,  an  editor,  and  a  poet.  As  a  man,  I  know 
none  with  such  an  affectionate  heart,  if  never  opposed  in  his 
opinions.  He  has  defects  of  course:  one  of  his  great  defects  is 
getting  inferior  people  about  him  to  listen,  too  fond  of  shining 
at  any  expense  in  society,  and  a  love  of  approbation  from  the 
darling  sex  bordering  on  weakness;  though  to  women  he  is 
delightfully  pleasant,  yet  they  seem  more  to  dandle  him  as  a 
delicate  plant.  I  don't  know  if  they  do  not  put  a  confidence 
in  him  which  to  me  would  be  mortifying. 

He  is  a  man  of  sensibility  tinged  with  morbidity,  and  of  such 
sensitive  organisation  of  body  that  the  plant  is  not  more  alive 
to  touch  than  he.  I  remember  once,  walking  in  a  field,  we 
came  to  a  muddy  place  concealed  by  grass.  The  moment  Hunt 
touched  it,  he  shrank  back,  saying,  'It's  muddy!'  as  if  he 
meaned  that  it  was  full  of  adders.  .  .  .  He  is  a  composition,  as 
we  all  are,  of  defects  and  delightful  qualities,  indolently  averse 
to  worldly  exertion,  because  it  harasses  the  musings  of  his  fancy, 
existing  only  by  the  common  duties  of  life,  yet  ignorant  of  them, 
and  often  suffering  from  their  neglect. 


A  few  days  later,  on  October  31,  we  find  Keats  writing 
to  Cowden  Clarke  of  his  pleasure  at  Hhe  thought  of 
seeing  so  soon  this  glorious  Hay  don  and  all  his  creations.' 
The  introduction  was  arranged  to  take  place  at  Leigh 
Hunt's  cottage,  where  they  met  for  dinner.  Haydon, 
the  sublime  egoist,  could  be  rapturously  sympathetic 
and  genuinely  kind  to  those  who  took  him  at  his  own 
valuation,  and  there  was  much  to  attract  the  spirits  of 
eager  youth  about  him  as  a  leader.  Keats  and  he  were 
mutually  delighted  at  first  sight:  each  struck  fire  from 
the  other,  and  they  quickly  became  close  friends  and 
comrades.  After  an  evening  of  high  talk  at  the  begin- 
ning of  their  acquaintance,  on  the  19th  of  November, 


AN  ENTHUSIASTIC  FRIENDSHIP  65 

1816,  the  young  poet  wrote  to  Haydon  as  follows, 
joining  his  name  with  those  of  Wordsworth  and  Leigh 
Hunt:— 

Last  evening  wrought  me  up,  and  I  cannot  forbear  sending 
you  the  following: — 

Great  spirits  now  on  earth  are  sojourning: 
He  of  the  cloud,  the  cataract,  the  lake. 
Who  on  Helvellyn's  summit,  wide  awake. 

Catches  his  freshness  from  Archangel's  wing: 

He  of  the  rose,  the  violet,  the  spring. 

The  social  smile,  the  chain  for  Freedom's  sake. 
And  lo  !  whose  steadfastness  would  never  take 

A  meaner  sound  than  Raphael's  whispering. 

And  other  spirits  there  are  standing  apart 
Upon  the  forehead  of  the  age  to  come; 

These,  these  will  give  the  world  another  heart. 
And  other  pulses.     Hear  ye  not  the  hum 

Of  mighty  workings  in  some  distant  mart? 
Listen  awhile,  ye  nations,  and  be  dumb. 

Haydon  was  at  no  time  of  his  life  unused  to  compliments 
of  this  kind.  About  the  same  time  as  Keats  another 
young  member  of  Hunt's  circle,  John  Hamilton  Rey- 
nolds, also  wrote  him  a  sonnet  of  eager  sympathy  and 
admiration;  and  the  three  addressed  to  him  some  years 
later  by  Wordsworth  are  well  known.  In  his  reply  to 
Keats  he  proposed  to  hand  on  the  above  piece  to  Words- 
worth— a  proposal  which  'puts  me/  answers  Keats, 
'out  of  breath — ^you  know  with  what  reverence  I  would 
send  my  well- wishes  to  him.'  Haydon  suggested  more- 
over the  needless,  and  as  it  seems  to  me  regrettable, 
mutilation  of  the  sonnet  by  leaving  out  the  words  after 
'workings'  in  the  last  line  but  one.  The  poet,  however, 
accepted  the  suggestion,  and  his  editors  have  respected 
his  decision. 

Some  time  after  the  turn  of  the  year  we  find  Keats 
presented  with  a  copy  of  Goldsmith's  Greek  History 
'from  his  ardent  friend,  B.  R.  Haydon.'  All  the  winter 
and  early  spring  the  two  met  frequently,  sometimes  at 
Haydon's  studio  in  Great  Marlborough  Street,  sometimes 
in  the  rooms  of  the  Keats  brothers  in  the  Poultry  or  in 


66       KEATS  AND  THE  ELGIN  MARBLES 

those  of  their  common  acquaintance,  and  discussed  with 
passionate  eagerness  most  things  in  heaven  and  earth, 
and  especially  poetry  and  painting.  *I  have  enjoyed 
Shakespeare,'  declares  Haydon,  ^with  John  Keats  more 
than  with  any  other  human  being.'  Both  he  and 
Keats's  other  painter  friend,  Joseph  Severn,  have 
testified  that  Keats  had  a  fine  natural  sense  for  the 
excellencies  of  painting  and  sculpture.  Both  loved  to 
take  him  to  the  British  Museum  and  expatiate  to  him 
on  the  glories  of  the  antique;  and  it  would  seem  that 
through  Haydon  he  must  have  had  access  also  to  the 
collection  of  one  at  least  of  the  great  dilettanti  noblemen 
of  the  day.  After  a  first  visit  to  the  newly  acquired 
Parthenon  marbles  with  Haydon  at  the  beginning  of 
March  1817,  Keats  tried  to  embody  his  impressions  in 
a  couple  of  sonnets,  which  Hunt  promptly  printed  in 
the  Examiner.  It  is  characteristic  of  his  unfailing 
sincerity  with  his  art  and  with  himself  that  he  allows 
himself  to  break  into  no  stock  raptures,  but  strives 
faithfully  to  get  into  words  the  confused  sensations 
of  spiritual  infirmity  and  awe  that  have  overpowered 
him: — 

My  spirit  is  too  weak — mortality 

Weighs  heavily  on  me  like  unwilling  sleep. 

And  each  imagin'd  pinnacle  and  steep 
Of  godlike  hardship,  tells  me  I  must  die 
Like  a  sick  Eagle  looking  at  the  sky. 

Yet  'tis  a  gentle  luxury  to  weep 

That  I  have  not  the  cloudy  winds  to  keep, 
Fresh  for  the  opening  of  the  morning's  eye. 
Such  dim-conceived  glories  of  the  brain 

Bring  round  the  heart  an  undescribable  feud; 
So  do  these  wonders  a  most  dizzy  pain, 

That  mingles  Grecian  grandeur  with  the  rude 
Wasting  of  old  Time — with  a  billowy  main — 

A  sun — a  shadow  of  a  magnitude. 

j< 

He  sends  this  with  a  covering  sonnet  to  Haydon 
asking  pardon  for  its  immaturity  and  justly  praising 
the  part  played  by  Haydon  in  forcing  the  acceptance 
of  the  marbles  upon  the  nation: — 


SONNETS  AND  PROTESTATIONS  67 

Haydon !  forgive  me  that  I  cannot  speak 

Definitely  on  these  mighty  things; 

Forgive  me  that  I  have  not  Eagle's  wings — 
That  what  I  want  I  know  not  where  to  seek; 
And  think  that  I  would  not  be  over  meek 

In  rolling  out  upfollow'd  thunderings, 

Even  to  the  steep  of  Heliconian  springs. 
Were  I  of  ample  strength  for  such  a  freak — 
Think  too,  that  all  those  numbers  should  be  thine; 

Whose  else  ?     In  this  who  touch  thy  vesture's  hem  ? 
For  when  men  star'd  at  what  was  most  divine 

With  browless  idiotism — o'erwise  phlegm — 
Thou  hadst  beheld  the  Hesperian  shine 

Of  their  star  in  the  East,  and  gone  to  worship  them. 

Haydon^s  acknowledgment  is  of  course  enthusiastic, 
but  betrays  his  unfortunate  gift  for  fustian  in  the 
following  precious  expansion  of  Keats's  image  of  the 
sick  eagle: — 

Many  thanks,  my  dear  fellow,  for  your  two  noble  sonnets.  I 
know  not  a  finer  image  than  the  comparison  of  a  poet  unable 
to  express  his  high  feelings  to  a  sick  eagle  looking  at  the  sky, 
where  he  must  have  remembered  his  former  towerings  amid  the 
blaze  of  dazzling  sunbeams,  in  the  pure  expanse  of  glittering 
clouds;  now  and  then  passing  angels,  on  heavenly  errands, 
lying  at  the  will  of  the  wind  with  moveless  wings,  or  pitching 
downward  with  a  fiery  rush,  eager  and  intent  on  objects  of 
their  seeking.  .  .  . 

In  Hay  don's  journal  about  the  same  date  there  is  an 
entry  which  reads  with  ironical  pathos  in  the  light  of 
after  events: — 'Keats  is  a  man  after  my  own  heart. 
He  sympathises  with  me,  and  comprehends  me.  We 
saw  through  each  other,  and  I  hope  are  friends  for  ever. 
I  only  know  that,  if  I  sell  my  picture,  Keats  shall  never 
want  till  another  is  done,  that  he  may  have  leisure  for 
his  effusions:  in  short  he  shall  never  want  all  his  life.' 
To  Keats  himself,  more  hyperbolically  still,  and  in 
terms  still  more  suited  to  draw  the  pitying  smile  of  the 
ironic  gods,  Haydon  writes  a  little  later: — 

Consider  this  letter  a  sacred  secret. — Often  have  I  sat  by  my 
fire  after  a  day's  effort,  as  the  dusk  approached  and  a  gauzy 
veil  seemed  dimming  all  things — and  mused  on  what  I  had  done. 


68  HAZLITT  AND  LAMB 

and  with  a  burning  glow  on  what  I  would  do  till  filled  with  fury 
I  have  seen  the  faces  of  the  mighty  dead  crowd  into  my  room, 
and  I  have  sunk  down  and  prayed  the  great  Spirit  that  I  might 
be  worthy  to  accompany  these  immortal  beings  in  their  immortal 
glories,  and  then  I  have  seen  each  smile  as  it  passes  over  me,  and 
each  shake  his  hand  in  awful  encouragement.  My  dear  Keats, 
the  Friends  who  surrounded  me  were  sensible  to  what  talent  I 
had, — but  no  one  reflected  my  enthusiasm  with  that  burning 
ripeness  of  soul,  my  heart  yearned  for  sympathy, — believe  me 
from  my  soul,  in  you  I  have  found  one, — you  add  fire,  when  I 
am  exhausted,  and  excite  fury  afresh — I  offer  my  heart  and 
intellect  and  experience — at  first  I  feared  your  ardor  might  lead 
you  to  disregard  the  accumulated  wisdom  of  ages  in  moral 
points — but  the  feelings  put  forth  lately  have  delighted  my 
soul.     God  bless  you!    Let  our  hearts  be  buried  on  each  other. 


Familiar  visitors  at  this  time  of  Haydon  in  the  Marl- 
borough Street  studio  and  of  Hunt  in  the  Hampstead 
cottage  were  two  men  of  finer  gift  than  either,  William 
Hazlitt  and  Charles  Lamb.  With  both  of  these  seniors 
(Lamb  was  forty-one  and  Hazlitt  thirty-eight)  Keats 
now  became  acquainted  without  becoming  intimate. 
Unluckily  neither  of  them  has  left  any  but  the  slightest 
personal  impression  of  the  young  poet,  whose  modesty 
probably  kept  him  somewhat  in  the  background  when 
they  were  by.  Haydon  used  to  complain  that  it  was 
only  after  Keats^s  death  that  he  could  get  Hazlitt  to 
acknowledge  his  genius;  but  Lamb,  as  we  shall  see, 
with  his  imerring  critical  touch,  paid  to  Keats^s  best 
work  while  he  was  still  living  a  tribute  as  splendid  as 
it  was  just.  Keats  on  his  part,  after  the  publication 
of  Hazlitt's  lectures  on  the  characters  of  Shakespeare 
in  1817,  reckoned  his  'depth  of  taste'  one  of  the  things 
most  to  rejoice  at  in  his  age,  and  was  a  diligent  attendant 
at  his  next  course  on  the  English  poets.  But  he  never 
frequented,  presumably  for  lack  of  invitation,  those 
Wednesday  and  Thursday  evening  parties  at  the  Lambs 
of  which  Talfourd  and  B.  W.  Procter  have  left  us  such 
vivid  pictures;  and  when  he  met  some  of  the  same 
company  at  the  Novellos^  the  friends  of  his  friend 
Cowden  Clarke,  he  enjoyed  it,  as  will  appear  later,  less 


FRIENDSHIP  OF  HUNT  AND  SHELLEY     69 

than  one  would  have  hoped.  He  has  left  no  personal 
impression  of  Hazlitt,  and  of  Lamb  only  the  slightest 
and  most  casual.  Fortunately  we  know  them  both  so 
well  from  other  sources  that  we  can  almost  see  and  hear 
them:  Hazlitt  with  his  unkempt  black  hair  and  restless 
grey  eyes,  lean,  slouching,  splenetic,  an  Ishmaelite 
full  of  mistrust  and  suspicion,  his  habitual  action  of  the 
hand  within  the  waistcoat  apt  in  his  scowling  moments 
to  suggest  a  hidden  dagger;  but  capable  withal,  in 
company  where  he  felt  secure,  of  throwing  into  his  talk 
much  the  same  fine  mixture  as  distinguishes  his  writing 
of  impetuous  fullness  and  variety  with  incisive  point 
and  critical  lucidity:  Lamb  noticeable  in  contrast  by 
his  neat,  sombrely  clad  small  figure  on  its  spindle  legs 
and  his  handsome  romantic  head;  by  his  hurried, 
stammering  utterance  and  too  often,  alas!  his  vinous 
flush  and  step  almost  as  titubant  as  his  tongue;  but 
most  of  all  by  that  airy  genius  of  insight  and  caprice, 
of  deep  tenderness  and  freakish  wisdom,  quick  to  break 
from  him  in  sudden,  illuminating  phrases  at  any  moment 
and  in  any  manner  save  the  expected. 

Yet  another  acquaintance  brought  about  by  Himt  in 
these  days  was  that  between  Keats  and  Shelley,  who 
was  Keats's  senior  by  only  three  years  and  with  whom 
Hunt  himself  was  now  first  becoming  intimate.  When 
Hunt  was  sentenced  for  sedition  four  years  earHer, 
Shelley,  then  barely  twenty,  had  been  eager  to  befriend 
him  and  had  sent  him  an  offer  of  money  help;  which 
for  once,  not  being  then  in  immediate  need,  Hunt  had 
honourably  declined.  Since  then  they  had  held  only 
sHght  communication;  but  when  Hunt  included  Shelley 
on  the  strength  of  his  poem  Alastor,  among  the  young 
poets  praised  in  his  Examiner  essay  (December  1,  1816), 
a  glowing  correspondence  immediately  followed,  and  a 
few  days  later  Shelley  came  up  from  Bath  to  stay  at  the 
Hampstead  cottage.  The  result  of  a  week's  visit  was 
an  immediate  intimacy  and  enthusiastic  mutual  regard, 
with  a  prompt  determination  on  Shelley's  part  to  rescue 
Hunt  from  the  slough  of  debt  (something  like  £1400) 


70       LAMB  AND  HAZLITT  ON  SHELLEY 

into  which  during  and  since  his  imprisonment  he  had 
cheerfully  muddled  himself. 

It  was  the  eve  of  the  most  harrowing  crisis  in  Shelley's 
life,  when  his  principle  of  love  a  law  to  itself  entailed  in 
action  so  dire  a  consequence,  and  his  obedience  to  his 
own  morality  brought  him  into  such  harsh  collision 
with  the  world's.  First  came  the  news  of  the  suicide  of 
his  deserted  wife  Harriet  (December  14)  and  three 
months  later  the  sentence  of  Lord  Eldon  which  deprived 
him  of  the  custody  of  his  and  Harriet's  children.  On 
the  day  of  the  first  tragic  news  he  writes  to  Mary  Godwin, 
whom  he  had  left  at  Bath,  ^  Leigh  Himt  has  been  with 
me  all  day,  and  his  delicate  and  tender  attentions  to 
me,  his  kind  speeches  of  you,  have  sustained  me  against 
the  weight  of  horror  of  this  event.'  In  the  interval 
between  the  shock  of  Harriet's  death  and  that  of  the 
judgment  sequestering  his  children  Shelley  was  a  fre- 
quent guest  in  the  Vale  of  Health,  sometimes  alone  and 
sometimes  with  Mary,  now  legally  his  wife.  Neither  in 
these  first  days  nor  later  could  Hunt  persuade  his  old 
intimates  Hazlitt  and  Lamb  to  take  kindly  to  his  new 
friend  Shelley  either  as  man  or  poet.  Lamb,  who  seems 
only  to  have  seen  him  once,  said  after  his  death,  'his 
voice  was  the  most  obnoxious  squeak  I  ever  was 
tormented  with';  of  his  poetry,  that  it  was  'thin 
sown  with  profit  or  delight';  and  of  his  'theories  and 
nostrums,'  that  'they  are  oracular  enough,  but  I  either 
comprehend  'em  not,  or  there  is  miching  malice  and 
mischief  in  'em.'  Hazlitt,  opening  the  most  studied  of 
his  several  attacks  on  Shelley's  poetry  and  doctrine, 
gives  one  of  his  vivid  portraits,  saying  '  he  has  a  fire 
in  his  eye,  a  fever  in  his  blood,  a  maggot  in  his  brain, 
a  hectic  flutter  in  his  speech.  ...  He  is  sanguine-com- 
plexioned,  and  shrill-voiced.  .  .  .  His  bending,  flexible 
form  appears  to  take  no  strong  hold  of  things,  does  not 
grapple  with  the  world  about  him,  but  flows  from  it 
like  a  river.'  Still  less  was  a  good  understanding 
possible  between  Shelley  and  Haydon,  who  met  him 
more  than  once  in  these  early  days  at  the  Vale  of  Health, 


HAYDON  AND  SHELLEY  :  A  BATTLE  ROYAL  71 

He  tells  how,  on  the  evening  of  their  first  meeting, 
Shelley,  looking  hectically  frail  and  girHsh,  opened  the 
conversation  at  dinner  with  the  words,  'as  to  that 
detestable  religion,  the  Christian,' — and  how  he,  Haydon, 
a  man  at  all  times  stoutly  and  vociferously  orthodox, 
waited  till  the  meal  was  over  and  then,  'like  a  stag  at 
bay  and  resolved  to  gore  without  mercy,'  struck  his 
hardest  on  behalf  of  the  established  faith,  while  Hunt 
in  his  aiiily  complacent  way  kept  skirmishing  in  on 
Shelley's  side,  until  ihe  contention  grew  hot  and  stormy. 
The  heat  and  noise,  Haydon  owns,  were  chiefly  on  his 
side,  and  we  might  guess  as  much  without  his  admission, 
for  we  have  abundant  evidence  of  the  imfaiHng  courtesy 
and  sweetness  of  manner  with  which  Shelley  would  in 
that  high-pitched  feminine  voice  of  his  advance  the 
most  staggering  propositions  and  patiently  encounter  the 
arguments  of  his  adversaries. 

Such  contentions,  victorious  as  he  always  held  himself 
to  be  in  them,  annoyed  Haydon.  The  queer  blend,  in 
the  atmosphere  of  the  Hampstead  cottage,  of  eager 
kindness  and  hospitality  and  a  graceful,  voluble  en- 
thusiasm for  the  'luxuries'  of  poetry,  art,  and  nature 
with  slatternly  housekeeping  and  a  spirit  of  fervent  or 
flippant  anti-Christianity,  became  distasteful  to  him, 
and  he  afterwards  dated  from  these  days  his  gradual 
estrangement  from  Himt  and  his  circle.  At  the  same 
time  he  began  to  try  and  draw  away  Keats  from  Hunt's 
influence. 

Keats,  we  are  told,  though  much  inclining  in  these 
days  towards  the  Voltairian  views  of  his  host,  would  take 
little  part  in  such  debates  as  that  above  narrated,  and 
once  even  supported  another  yoimg  member  of  the  circle, 
Joseph  Severn,  in  a  defence  of  Christianity  against  Hunt 
and  Shelley.  To  Shelley  himself,  his  senior  by  three 
years,  his  relation  was  from  the  first  and  remained  to 
the  end  one  of  friendly  civility  and  Httle  more.  He 
did  not  take  to  Shelley  as  kindly  as  Shelley  did  to  him, 
says  Hunt,  and  adds  the  comment:  'Keats,  being  a 
little  too  sensitive  on  the  score  of  his  origin,  felt  inclined 


72  KEATS  AND  SHELLEY 

to  see  in  every  man  of  birth  a  sort  of  natural  enemy/ 
'He  was  haughty,  and  had  a  fierce  hatred  of  rank/ 
says  Haydon  in  his  unqualified  way.  Where  his  pride 
had  not  been  aroused  by  anticipation,  Keats,  as  we  have 
seen,  was  eagerly  open-hearted  to  new  friendships,  and 
it  may  well  be  that  the  reserve  he  maintained  towards 
Shelley  was  assumed  at  first  by  way  of  defence  against 
the  possibility  of  social  patronage  on  the  other's  part. 
But  he  must  soon  have  perceived  that  from  Shelley,  a 
gentleman  of  gentlemen,  such  an  attitude  was  the  last 
thing  to  be  apprehended,  and  the  cause  of  his  standing 
off  was  much  more  Hkely  his  knowledge  that  nearly  aU 
Shelley's  literary  friends  were  his  pensioners, — from 
Godwin,  the  greediest,  to  Leigh  Hunt,  the  lightest- 
hearted, — and  a  fear  that  he  too  might  be  supposed 
to  expect  a  similar  bounty.  It  would  seem  that  in  his 
spirit  of  independence  he  gave  Shelley  the  impression 
of  being  much  better  off  than  he  was, — or  possibly 
instances  of  his  only  too  ready  generosity  in  lending 
from  his  modest  means  to  his  intimates  when  they  were 
hard  pressed  may  have  come  to  Shelley's  knowledge: 
at  all  events  a  few  months  later  we  find  Shelley  casting 
about  for  persons  able  to  help  him  in  helping  Hunt, 
and  writing  under  a  false  impression,  'Keats  certainly 
can.' 

These  two  yoimg  poets,  equally  and  conjointly  beloved 
by  posterity,  were  in  truth  at  many  points  the  most 
opposite-natured  of  men.  Pride  and  sensitiveness  apart, 
we  can  imagine  that  a  full  understanding  was  not  easy 
between  them.  Keats,  with  the  rich  elements  of  earthly 
clay  in  his  composition,  his  lively  vein  of  every-day 
common-sense  and  humour,  his  keen,  tolerant  delight 
and  interest  in  the  aspects  and  activities  of  nature  and 
human  nature  as  he  found  them,  may  well  have  been 
as  much  repelled  as  attracted  by  Shelley,  Shelley  the 
'Elfin  knight,'  the  spirit  all  air  and  fire,  with  his  pas- 
sionate repudiation  of  the  world's  ways  and  the  world's 
law,  his  passionate  absorption  in  his  vision  of  a  happier 
scheme  of  things,  a  vision  engendered  in  himianitarian 


A  COOL  RELATION  73 

dreams  from  his  readings  of  Rousseau  and  Godwin  and 
Plato, — or  was  it  rather  one  brought  with  him  from  some 
ante-natal  sojourn  among  the  radiances  and  serenities  of 
the  sunset  clouds?  Leigh  Hunt's  way  of  putting  it  is 
this: — ^ Keats,  notwithstanding  his  unbounded  sym- 
pathies with  ordinary  flesh  and  blood,  and  even  the 
transcendental  cosmopolitics  of  Hyperion,  was  so  far 
inferior  in  universality  to  his  great  acquaintance,  that 
he  could  not  accompany  him  in  his  daedal  rounds  with 
nature,  and  his  Archimedean  endeavours  to  move  the 
globe  with  his  own  hands/  Of  the  incidents  and  results 
of  their  intercourse  at  Hampstead  we  know  little  more 
than  that  Shelley,  wisely  enough  in  the  light  of  his  own 
headlong  early  experiments,  tried  to  dissuade  Keats 
from  premature  publication;  and  that  Keats  on  his 
part  declined,  'in  order  that  he  might  have  his  own 
imfettered  scope,'  a  cordial  invitation  from  Shelley  to 
come  and  stay  with  him  at  Great  Marlow.  Keats, 
though  he  must  have  known  that  he  could  learn  much 
from  Shelley's  trained  scholarship  and  fine  literary 
sense,  was  doubtless  right  in  feeling  that  whatever 
power  of  poetry  might  be  in  him  must  work  its  own  way 
to  maturity  in  freedom  and  not  in  leading-strings.  To 
these  scanty  facts  Shelley's  cousin  Medwin  adds  the 
statement  that  the  two  agreed  to  write  in  friendly 
rivalry  the  long  poems  each  was  severally  meditating 
for  his  sunMner's  work,  Shelley  Laon  and  Cythna, 
afterwards  called  The  Revolt  of  Islam,  and  Keats  Endy- 
mion.  This  may  very  well  have  been  the  case,  but 
Medwin  was  a  man  so  lax  of  memory,  tongue,  and  pen 
that  his  evidence,  unconfirmed,  counts  for  little.  Of  the 
influence  possibly  exercised  on  Keats  by  Shelley's  first 
important  poem,  Alastor,  or  by  his  Hymn  to  Intellectual 
Beauty  printed  in  the  Examiner  during  the  January  of 
their  intercourse  at  Himt's,  it  will  be  time  to  speak 
later  on. 

A  much  closer  intimacy  sprang  up  between  Keats  and 
the  other  young  poetic  aspirant  whom  Hunt  in  his 
December  essay  in  the  Examiner  had  bracketed  with 


74  JOHN  HAMILTON  REYNOLDS 

him  and  Shelley.  This  was  John  Hamilton  Reynolds, 
of  whom  we  have  as  yet  heard  only  the  name.  He  was 
a  handsome,  witty,  enthusiastic  youth  a  year  younger 
than  Keats,  having  been  born  at  Shrewsbury  in  Septem- 
ber 1796.  Part  of  his  boyhood  was  spent  in  Devonshire 
near  Sidmouth,  a  countryside  to  which  he  remained 
always  deeply  attached;  but  he  was  still  quite  young 
when  his  father  came  and  settled  in  London  as  mathe- 
matical master  and  head  writing  master  at  Christ's 
Hospital.  The  elder  Reynolds  and  his  wife  were  people 
of  literary  leanings  and  literary  acquaintance,  and  seem 
to  have  been  characters  in  their  way:  both  Charles 
Lamb  and  Leigh  Himt  were  frequenters  of  their  house 
in  Little  Britain,  and  Mrs  Reynolds  is  reported  asliolding 
her  own  well  among  the  talkers  at  Lamb^s  evenings. 
Their  son  John  was  educated  at  St  Paul's  school  and 
showed  talent  and  inclinations  which  drew  him  preco- 
ciously into  the  literary  movement  of  the  time.  At 
eighteen  he  wrote  an  Eastern  tale  in  verse  in  the  Byronic 
manner,  Safie,  of  which  Byron  acknowledged  the  pre- 
sentation copy  in  a  kind  and  careful  letter  several  pages 
long.  Two  years  later,  just  about  the  time  of  his  first 
introduction  to  Keats  at  Leigh  Hunt's,  the  youngster 
had  the  honour  of  receiving  a  similar  attention  from 
Wordsworth  in  reply  to  a  presentation  of  another  poem. 
The  Naiad  (November  1816).  Neither  of  these  two 
youthful  volimies,  nor  yet  a  third,  The  Eden  of  Imagina- 
tion, shewed  much  more  than  a  quick  susceptibility  to 
nature  and  romance,  and  a  gift  of  falling  in  readily  and 
gracefully  now  with  one  and  now  with  another  of  the 
poetic  fashions  of  the  hour.  Byron,  Scott,  Wordsworth, 
and  Leigh  Hunt  were  alternately  his  models. 

The  same  gift  of  adaptiveness  which  Reynolds  shewed 
in  serious  work  made  him  when  he  chose  a  deft,  some- 
times even  a  masterly,  parodist  in  the  humourous  vein, 
and  his  work  done  in  this  vein  a  few  years  later  in  colla- 
boration with  Thomas  Hood  holds  its  own  well  beside 
that  of  his  associate.  Partly  owing  to  the  persuasions 
of  the  lady  to  whom  he  was  engaged,  Reynolds  early 


HIS  DEVOTION  TO  KEATS  75 

gave  up  the  hope  of  a  Hterary  career  and  went  into 
business  as  a  sohcitor.  In  1818  he  inscribed  a  farewell 
sonnet  to  the  Muses  in  a  copy  of  Shakespeare  which  he 
gave  to  KeatS;  and  in  1821  he  writes  again 

As  time  increases 
I  give  up  drawling  verse  for  drawing  leases. 

In  point  of  fact  he  continued  to  write  occasionally  for 
some  years,  and  in  the  end  failed  somewhat  tragically 
to  prosper  in  the  profession  of  law.  During  these  early 
3^ears  he  was  not  only  one  of  the  warmest  friends  Keats 
had  but  one  of  the  wisest,  to  whom  Keats  could  open 
liis  innermost  mind  with  the  certainty  of  being  under- 
stood, and  who  once  at  least  saved  him  from  a  serious 
mistake.  A  sonnet  written  by  him  within  three  months 
of  their  first  meeting  proves  with  what  warmth  of 
affection  as  well  as  with  what  generosity  of  admiration 
the  one  young  aspirant  from  the  first  regarded  the  other. 
Keats  one  day,  calling  on  Cowden  Clarke  and  finding 
him  asleep  over  Chaucer,  passed  the  time  by  writing  on 
the  blank  space  at  the  end  of  The  Floure  and  the  Lefe,  a 
poem  with  which  he  was  already  familiar,  the  sonnet 
beginning  ^This  pleasant  tale  is  like  a  little  copse.'  ^ 
Reynolds's  comment  after  reading  it  is  as  follows: — 

Thy  thoughts,  dear  Keats,  are  like  fresh-gathered  leaves. 

Or  white  flowers  pluck'd  from  some  sweet  lily  bed; 

They  set  the  heart  a-breathing,  and  they  shed 
The  glow  of  meadows,  mornings,  and  spring  eves. 
O'er  the  excited  soul. — Thy  genius  weaves 

Songs  that  shall  make  the  age  be  nature-led. 

And  win  that  coronal  for  thy  young  head 
Which  time's  strange  hand  of  freshness  ne'er  bereaves. 
Go  on !  and  keep  thee  to  thine  own  green  way. 

Singing  in  that  same  key  which  Chaucer  sung; 

^  Cowden  Clarke,  writing  many  years  later,  suggests  that  this  was  Keats's 
first  acquaintance  with  Chaucer.  He  is  certainly  mistaken.  It  was  on 
Feb.  27,  1817,  that  Keats  called  and  found  him  asleep  as  related  in  the 
text.  Within  a  week  was  published  the  volume  of  Poems,  with  the  prin- 
cipal piece.  Sleep  and  Poetry,  partly  modelled  on  the  Floure  and  the  Lefe 
itself  and  headed  with  a  quotation  from  it.  It  is  needless  to  add  that 
later  criticism  does  not  admit  The  Floure  and  Lefe  into  the  canon  of 
Chaucer's  works. 


76  THE  REYNOLDS  SISTERS:    JAMES  RICE 

Be  thou  companion  of  the  summer  day, 

Roaming  the  fields  and  older  woods  among: — 

So  shall  thy  muse  be  ever  in  her  May, 
And  thy  luxuriant  spirit  ever  young. 

Reynolds  had  two  sisters,  Mariane  and  Jane,  older  than 
himself,  and  a  third,  Charlotte,  several  years  younger. 
With  the  elder  two  Keats  was  soon  on  terms  of  almost 
brotherly  intimacy  and  affection,  seeing  them  often  at 
the  family  home  in  Little  Britain,  exchanging  Hvely 
letters  with  them  in  absence,  and  contributing  to  Jane's 
album  sets  of  verses  some  of  which  have  only  through 
this  means  been  preserved.  A  little  later  the  piano- 
plajdng  of  the  youngest  sister,  Charlotte,  was  often  a 
source  of  great  pleasure  to  him. 

Outside  his  own  family  Reynolds  had  an  inseparable 
friend  with  whom  Keats  also  became  quickly  intimate: 
this  was  James  Rice,  a  young  solicitor  of  literary  tastes 
and  infinite  jest,  chronically  aiHng  or  worse  in  health, 
but  always,  in  Keats's  words,  'coming  on  his  legs  again 
like  a  cat';  ever  cheerful  and  willing  in  spite  of  his 
sufferings,  and  indefatigable  in  good  offices  to  those 
about  him:  'dear  noble  generous  James  Rice,'  records 
Dilke, — 'the  best,  and  in  his  quaint  way  one  of  the 
wittiest  and  wisest  men  I  ever  knew.'  It  was  through 
Rice  that  there  presently  came  to  Reynolds  that  un- 
congenial business  opening  which  in  worldly  wisdom  he 
held  himself  bound  to  accept.  Besides  Reynolds, 
another  and  more  insignificant  young  versifying  member, 
or  satellite,  of  Hunt's  set  when  Keats  first  joined  it  was 
one  Cornelius  Webb,  remembered  now,  if  remembered 
at  all,  by  the  derisory  quotation  in  Blackwood^ s  Magazine 
of  his  rimes  on  Byron  and  Keats,  as  well  as  by  a  dispar- 
aging allusion  in  one  of  Keats's  own  later  letters.  He 
disappeared  early  from  the  circle,  but  not  before  he 
had  caught  enough  of  its  spirit  to  write  sonnets  and 
poetical  addresses  which  might  almost  be  taken  for 
the  work  of  Hunt,  or  even  for  that  of  Keats  himself  in 
his  weak  moments;  and  for  some  years  afterwards 
served  as  press-reader  in  the  printing-office  of  Messrs 


CHARLES  WELLS:    WILLIAM  HASLAM     77 

Clowes,  being  charged  especially  with  the  revision  of 
the  Quarterly  proofs. 

To  turn  to  other  close  associates  of  Keats  during  the 
same  period,  known  to  him  not  through  Hunt  but 
through  his  brothers, — a  word  may  suffice  for  Charles 
Wells,  to  whom  we  find  him  addressing  in  the  summer  of 
1816  a  sonnet  of  thanks  for  a  gift  of  roses.  Wells  had 
been  a  schoolmate  of  Tom  Keats  and  R.  H.  Home,  and 
is  described  as  in  those  days  a  small,  red-headed,  snub- 
nosed,  blue-eyed  youth  of  irrepressible  animal  spirits. 
Now  or  somewhat  later  he  foimed  an  intimacy,  never 
afterwards  broken,  with  Hazlitt.  Keats's  own  regard 
for  Wells  was  short-lived,  being  changed  a  year  or 
so  later  into  fierce  indignation  when  Wells  played 
off  a  heartless  practical  joke  upon  the  consumptive 
Tom  in  the  shape  of  a  batch  of  pretended  love- 
letters  from  an  imaginary  'Amena.'  It  was  after 
Keats's  death  that  Wells  earned  a  place  of  his  own 
in  literature  with  the  poetic  drama  Joseph  and  his 
Brethren,  dead-born  in  its  first  anonymous  form  and 
re-animated  after  many  years,  but  still  during  the 
life-time  of  its  author,  through  the  enthusiasm  which 
its  qualities  of  intellect  and  passion  inspired  in  Rossetti 
and  Swinburne. 

Of  far  different  importance  were  two  other  acquain- 
tanceships, which  Keats  owed  to  his  brother  George  and 
which  in  the  same  months  were  ripening  into  affection, 
one  of  them  into  an  affection  priceless  in  the  sequel. 
The  first  was  with  a  young  solicitor  called  William 
Haslam  (it  is  odd  how  high  a  proportion  of  Keats's 
intimates  were  of  this  profession).  Of  him  no  personal 
picture  has  come  down  to  us,  but  in  the  coming 
days  we  find  him,  of  all  the  set,  the  most  prompt  and 
serviceable  on  occasions  of  practical  need  or  urgency: 
^our  oak  friend'  he  is  called  in  one  such  crisis  by  Joseph 
Severn.  It  was  as  the  friend  of  Haslam,  and  through 
Haslam  of  his  brother  George,  that  Keats  first  knew 
Joseph  Severn,  whose  name  is  now  inseparable  from  his 
own.    He  was  two  years  Keats' s  senior,  the  son  of  a 


78  JOSEPH  SEVERN 

music-master  sprung  from  an  old  Gloucestershire  stock 
and  having  a  good  connexion  in  the  northern  suburbs 
of  London.  The  elder  Severn  seems  to  have  been  much 
of  a  domestic  tyrant,  and  in  all  things  headstrong  and 
hot-headed,  but  blessed  with  an  admirable  wife  whom 
he  appreciated  and  who  contrived  to  make  the  household 
run  endurably  if  not  comfortably.  Joseph,  the  son, 
shewing  a  precocious  talent  for  drawing,  was  appren- 
ticed to  a  stipple  engraver,  but  the  perpetual  task  of 
'stabbing  copper'  irked  him  too  sorely:  his  ambition 
was  to  be  a  painter,  and  against  the  angry  opposition 
of  his  father  he  contrived  to  attend  the  Royal  Academy 
schools,  picking  up  meanwhile  for  himself  what  educa- 
tion in  letters  he  could.  He  had  a  hereditary  talent  for 
music,  an  untrained  love  for  books  and  poetry,  and 
doubtless  some  touch  already  of  that  engaging  social 
charm  which  Ruskin  noted  in  him  when  they  first  met 
five  and  twenty  years  later  in  Rome.  He  was  begin- 
ning to  get  a  little  practice  as  a  miniature  painter  and 
to  make  private  attempts  in  history-painting  when  he 
met  the  brilliant  young  poet-student  of  Guy's,  with 
whom  he  was  shy  and  timid  at  first,  as  with  a  sort  of 
superior  being.  But  before  long  he  became  used  to 
drinking  in  with  delight  all  that  Keats,  in  communicative 
hours,  was  moved  to  pour  out  from  the  play  of  his 
imagination  or  the  stores — infinite  as  to  the  innocent 
Severn  they  appeared — of  his  reading  in  poetry  and 
history.  What  especially,  he  recorded  in  after  life, 
used  to  enrapture  him  was  Keats's  talk  on  the  meaning 
and  beauty  of  the  Greek  polytheism  as  a  'religion  of 
joy.'  On  his  own  part  he  was  proud  to  act  as  cicerone 
to  Keats  in  the  British  Museum  or  the  British  Institution 
(the  National  Gallery  as  yet  was  not),  and  deferentially 
to  point  out  to  him  the  glories  of  the  antique  or  of 
Titian  and  Claude  and  Poussin. 

Thus  our  obscurely-born  and  half-schooled  young 
medical  student,  the  orphan  son  of  a  Finsbury  stable- 
keeper,  found  himself  at  twenty-one,  before  the  end  of 
his  second  winter  in  London,  fairly  launched  in  a  world 


KEATS  JUDGED  BY  HIS  CIRCLE  79 

of  art,  letters,  and  liberal  aspirations  and  living  in 
familiar  intimacy  with  some,  and  friendly  acquaintance 
with  others,  of  the  most  gifted  spirits  of  his  time.  The 
power  and  charm  of  genius  already  shone  from  him, 
and  impressed  alike  his  older  and  his  younger  com- 
panions. Portraits  of  him  verbal  and  other  exist  in 
abundance.  A  small,  compact,  well-turned  figure, 
broad-chested  for  its  height,  which  was  barely  an  inch 
over  five  feet;  a  shapely  head  set  off  by  thickly  clustering 
gold-brown  hair  and  carried  with  an  eager  upward  and 
forward  thrust  from  the  shoulders;  the  features  power- 
ful, finished,  and  mobile,  with  an  expression  at  once 
bold  and  sensitive;  the  forehead  sloping  and  not  high, 
but  broad  and  strong:  the  brows  well  arched  above 
hazel-brown,  liquid  flashing  eyes,  ^like  the  eyes  of  a 
wild  gypsy  maid  in  colour,  set  in  the  face  of  a  young 
god,'  Severn  calls  them.  To  the  same  effect  Hay  don, — 
'an  eye  that  had  an  inward  look,  perfectly  divine,  like 
a  Delphian  priestess  who  saw  visions':  and  again  Leigh 
Himt, — Hhe  eyes  mellow  and  glowing,  large,  dark,  and 
sensitive.  At  the  recital  of  a  noble  action  or  a  beautiful 
thought,  they  would  suffuse  with  tears  and  his  mouth 
tremble.'  In  like  manner  George  Keats, — ^John's  eyes 
moistened  and  his  lip  quivered  at  the  relation  of  any 
tale  of  generosity  or  benevolence  or  noble  daring,  or  at 
sights  of  loveliness  or  distress.'  And  once  more  Haydon, 
— 'Keats  was  the  only  man  I  ever  met  who  seemed  and 
looked  conscious  of  a  high  calling,  except  Wordsworth. 
...  He  was  in  his  glory  in  the  fields.  The  humming  of 
a  bee,  the  sight  of  a  flower,  the  glitter  of  the  sun,  seemed 
to  make  his  nature  tremble,  then  his  eyes  flashed,  his 
cheek  glowed  and  his  mouth  quivered.'  'Nothing 
seemed  to  escape  him,' — I  now  quote  paragraphs  com- 
piled by  the  late  Mr  William  Sharp  from  many  jotted 
reminiscences  of  Severn's, — 

Nothing  seemed  to  escape  him,  the  song  of  a  bird  and  the 
undemote  of  response  from  covert  or  hedge,  the  rustle  of  some 
animal,  the  changing  of  the  green  and  brown  Hghts  and  furtive 
shadows,  the  motions  of  the  wind — ^just  how  it  took  certain  tall 


80  DESCRIBED  BY  SEVERN 

flowers  and  plants — and  the  wayfaring  of  the  clouds:  even  the 
features  and  gestures  of  passing  tramps,  the  colour  of  one  woman's 
hair,  the  smile  on  one  child's  face,  the  furtive  animalism 
below  the  deceptive  humanity  in  many  of  the  vagrants,  even 
the  hats,  clothes,  shoes,  wherever  these  conveyed  the  remotest 
hint  as  to  the  real  self  of  the  wearer.  Withal,  even  when  in  a 
mood  of  joyous  observance,  with  flow  of  happy  spirits,  he  would 
suddenly  become  taciturn,  not  because  he  was  tired,  not  even 
because  his  mind  was  suddenly  wrought  to  some  bewitching 
vision,  but  from  a  profound  disquiet  which  he  could  not  or 
would  not  explain. 

Certain  things  affected  him  extremely,  particularly  when  'a 
wave  was  billowing  through  a  tree,'  as  he  described  the 
uplifting  surge  of  air  among  swaying  masses  of  chestnut  or 
oak  foliage,  or  when,  afar  off,  he  heard  the  wind  coming 
across  woodlands.  *The  tide!  the  tide!*  he  would  cry  de- 
lightedly, and  spring  on  to  some  stile,  or  upon  the  low  bough 
of  a  wayside  tree,  and  watch  the  passage  of  the  wind  upon 
the  meadow  grasses  or  young  com,  not  stirring  till  the  flow  of 
air  was  all  around  him,  while  an  expression  of  rapture  made  his 
eyes  gleam  and  his  face  glow  till  he  *  would  look  sometimes  like 
a  wild  fawn  waiting  for  some  cry  from  the  forest  depths,'  or 
like  *  a  young  eagle  staring  with  proud  joy  before  taking  flight.'  .  .  . 

Though  small  of  stature,  not  more  than  three-Jquarters  of  an 
inch  over  five  feet,  he  seemed  taller,  partly  from  the  perfect 
symmetry  of  his  frame,  partly  from  his  erect  attitude  and  a 
characteristic  backward  poise  (sometimes  a  toss)  of  the  head, 
and,  perhaps  more  than  anything  else,  from  a  peculiarly  dauntless 
expression,  such  as  may  be  seen  on  the  face  of  some  seamen.  .  .  . 

The  only  time  he  appeared  as  small  of  stature  was  when  he 
was  reading,  or  when  he  was  walking  rapt  in  some  deep  reverie; 
when  the  chest  fell  in,  the  head  bent  forward  as  though  weightily 
overburdened,  and  the  eyes  seemed  almost  to  throw  a  light  before 
his  face.  .  .  . 

The  only  thing  that  would  bring  Keats  out  of  one  of  his  fits 
of  seeming  gloomful  reverie — the  only  thing,  during  those  country- 
rambles,  that  would  bring  the  poet  *to  himself  again'  was  the 
motion  *of  the  inland  sea'  he  loved  so  well,  particularly  the 
violent  passage  of  wind  across  a  great  field  of  barley.  From 
fields  of  oats  or  barley  it  was  almost  impossible  to  allure  him; 
he  would  stand,  leaning  forward,  listening  intently,  watching 
with  a  bright  serene  look  in  his  eyes  and  sometimes  with  a  slight 
smile,  the  tumultuous  passage  of  the  wind  above  the  grain.  The 
sea,  or  thought-compelling  images  of  the  sea,  always  seemed  to 
restore  him  to  a  happy  calm. 


HIS  RANGE  OF  SYMPATHIES  81 

In  regard  to  Keats^s  social  qualities,  he  is  said,  and 
owns  himself,  to  have  been  not  always  quite  well  con- 
ditioned or  at  his  ease  in  the  presence  of  women,  but 
in  that  of  men  all  accounts  agree  that  he  was  pleasant- 
ness itself:  quiet  and  abstracted  or  brilliant  and  voluble 
by  turns,  according  to  his  mood  and  company,  but 
thoroughly  amiable  and  unaffected.  His  voice  was  rich 
and  low,  and  when  he  joined  in  discussion,  it  was  usually 
with  an  eager  but  gentle  animation,  while  his  occasional 
bursts  of  fierce  indignation  at  wrong  or  meanness  bore 
no  undue  air  of  assumption,  and  failed  not  to  command 
respect.  'In  my  knowledge  of  my  fellow  beings,'  says 
Cowden  Clarke,  'I  never  knew  one  who  so  thoroughly 
combined  the  sweetness  with  the  power  of  gentleness, 
and  the  irresistible  sway  of  anger,  as  Keats.  His  indig- 
nation would  have  made  the  boldest  grave;  and  they 
who  had  seen  him  under  the  influence  of  injustice  and 
meanness  of  soul  would  not  forget  the  expression  of  his 
features — "the  form  of  his  visage  was  changed. ''' 

In  lighter  moods  his  powers  of  mimicry  and  dramatic 
recital  are  described  as  great  and  never  used  unkindly. 
He  loved  the  exhibition  of  any  kind  of  energy,  and  was 
as  almost  as  keen  a  spectator  of  the  rough  and  violent 
as  of  the  tender  and  joyous  aspects  and  doings  of  life 
and  natiu-e.  'Though  a  quarrel  in  the  streets,'  he  says, 
*is  a  thing  to  be  hated  the  energies  displayed  in  it  are 
fine;  the  commonest  man  shows  a  grace  in  his  quarrel.' 
His  yearning  love  for  the  old  polytheism  and  instinctive 
affinity  with  the  Greek  spirit  did  not  at  all  blunt  his 
reKsh  of  actualities.  To  complete  our  picture  and  illus- 
trate the  wide  and  unf  astidious  range  of  his  contact  with 
fife  and  interest  in  things,  let  us  take  Cowden  Clarke's 
account  of  the  way  he  could  enjoy  and  re-enact  such  a 
scene  of  brutal  sport  and  human  low-life  as  our  refine- 
ment no  longer  tolerates: — 

His  perception  of  humour,  with  the  power  of  transmitting  it 
by  imitation,  was  both  vivid  and  irresistibly  amusing.  He  once 
described  to  me  having  gone  to  see  a  bear-baiting.  The  per- 
formance not  having  begun,  Keats  was  near  to,  and  watched,  a 


82  HIS  POETIC  AMBITION 

young  aspirant,  who  had  brought  a  younger  under  his  wing  to 
witness  the  solemnity,  and  whom  he  oppressively  patronized, 
instructing  him  in  the  names  and  qualities  of  all  the  magnates 
present.  Now  and  then,  in  his  zeal  to  manifest  and  impart  his 
knowledge,  he  would  forget  himself,  and  stray  beyond  the  pre- 
scribed bounds  into  the  ring,  to  the  lashing  resentment  of  its 
comptroller,  Mr  William  Soames,  who,  after  some  hints  of  a 
practical  nature  to  *keep  back'  began  laying  about  him  with 
indiscriminate  and  unmitigable  vivacity,  the  Peripatetic  sig- 
nifying to  his  pupil.  *  My  eyes !  Bill  Soames  giv'  me  sich  a 
licker!'  evidently  grateful,  and  considering  himself  compli- 
mented upon  being  included  in  the  general  dispensation.  Keats's 
entertainment  with  and  appreciation  of  this  minor  scene  of  low 
Hfe  has  often  recurred  to  me.  But  his  concurrent  personification 
of  the  baiting,  with  his  position, — his  legs  and  arms  bent  and 
shortened  till  he  looked  like  Bruin  on  his  hind  legs,  dabbing  his 
fore  paws  hither  and  thither,  as  the  dogs  snapped  at  him,  and 
now  and  then  acting  the  gasp  of  one  that  had  been  suddenly 
caught  and  hugged — ^his  own  capacious  mouth  adding  force  to 
the  personation,  was  a  remarkable  and  as  memorable  a  display. 

Thus  stamped  by  nature,  and  moving  in  such  a  circle 
as  we  have  described,  Keats  found  among  those  with 
whom  he  lived  nothing  to  check,  but  rather  everything 
to  foster,  his  hourly  growing,  still  diffident  and  half 
awe-stricken,  passion  for  the  poetic  life.  Poetry  and 
the  love  of  poetry  were  at  this  period  in  the  air.  It  was 
a  time  when  even  people  of  business  and  people  of 
fashion  read:  a  time  of  literary  excitement,  expectancy, 
discussion,  and  disputation  such  as  England  has  not 
known  since.  Fortunes,  even,  had  been  made  or  were 
being  made  in  poetry;  by  Scott,  by  Byron,  by  Moore, 
whose  Irish  Melodies  were  an  income  to  him  and  who 
was  known  to  have  just  received  a  cheque  of  £3000  in 
advance  for  Lalla  Rookh.  In  such  an  atmosphere  Keats, 
having  enough  of  his  inheritance  left  after  payment  of 
his  school  and  hospital  expenses  to  live  on  for  at  least 
a  year  or  two,  soon  found  himself  induced  to  try  his 
luck  and  his  powers  with  the  rest.  The  backing  of  his 
friends  was  indeed  only  too  ready  and  enthusiastic.  His 
brothers,  including  the  business  member  of  the  family, 
the  sensible  and  practical  George,  were  as  eager  that 


THE  DIE  IS  CAST  83 

John  should  become  a  famous  poet  as  he  was  himself. 
So  encouraged,  he  made  up  his  mind  to  give  up  the 
pursuit  of  surgery  for  that  of  literature,  and  declared 
his  decision,  being  now  of  age,  firmly  to  his  guardian; 
who  naturally  but  in  vain  opposed  it  to  the  best  of  his 
power.  The  consequence  was  a  quarrel,  which  Mr  Abbey 
afterwards  related,  in  a  livelier  manner  than  we  should 
have  expected  from  him,  in  the  same  document,  now 
unfortunately  gone  astray,  to  which  I  have  already 
referred  as  containiug  his  character  of  the  poet's  mother. 
The  die  was  cast.  In  the  Marlborough  Street  studio,  in 
the  Hampstead  cottage,  in  the  City  lodgings  of  the  three 
brothers  and  the  social  gatherings  of  their  friends,  it  was 
determined  that  John  Keats  (or  according  to  his  con- 
vivial alias  '  Junkets  0  should  put  forth  a  volume  of  his 
poems.  Leigh  Hunt  brought  on  the  scene  a  firm  of 
publishers  supposed  to  be  sympathetic,  the  brothers 
Charles  and  James  Oilier,  who  had  already  published 
for  Shelley  and  who  readily  undertook  the  issue.  The 
volume  was  printed,  and  the  last  proof-sheets  were 
brought  one  evening  to  the  author  amid  a  jovial  com- 
pany, with  the  intimation  that  if  a  dedication  was  to  be 
added  the  copy  must  be  furnished  at  once.  Keats  going 
to  one  side  quickly  produced  the  sonnet  To  Leigh 
Hunt  Esqr,  with  its  excellent  opening  and  its  weak 
conclusion: — 


Glory  and  Loveliness  have  passed  away; 

For  if  we  wander  out  in  early  morn. 

No  wreathed  incense  do  we  see  upborne 
Into  the  East  to  meet  the  smiling  day: 
No  crowd  of  nymphs  soft-voiced  and  young  and  gay, 

In  woven  baskets  bringing  ears  of  corn, 

Roses  and  pinks,  and  violets,  to  adorn 
The  shrine  of  Flora  in  her  early  May. 
But  there  are  left  delights  as  high  as  these. 

And  I  shall  ever  bless  my  destiny. 
That  in  a  time  when  under  pleasant  trees 

Pan  is  no  longer  sought,  I  feel  a  free, 
A  leafy  luxury,  seeing  I  could  please. 

With  these  poor  offerings,  a  man  like  thee. 


84  FIRST  VOLUME  GOES  TO  PRESS 

With  this  confession  of  a  longing  retrospect  towards  the 
beauty  of  the  old  pagan  world  and  of  gratitude  for 
present  friendship,  the  young  poet's  first  venture  was 
sent  forth,  amid  the  applauding  expectations  of  all  his 
circle,  in  the  first  days  of  March  1817. 

J    ■ 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  'POEMS'   OF   1817 

Spirit  and  chief  contents  of  the  volume — Sonnets  and  rimed  heroics — 
The  Chapman  sonnet — The  'How  many  bards'  sonnet — The  sex- 
chivalry  group — The  Leigh  Hunt  group — The  Haydon  pair — ^The 
Leander  sonnet — Epistles — History  of  the  'heroic'  couplet — The 
closed  and  free  systems — Marlowe — Drayton — William  Browne — 
Chapmaa  and  Sandys — Decay  of  the  free  system — William  Chamber- 
layne — Milton  and  Marvell — Waller — Katherine  Phillips — Dryden — 
Pope  and  his  ascendency — Reaction:  The  Brothers  Warton — 
Symptoms  of  Emancipation — Coleridge,  Wordsworth  and  Scott — 
Leigh  Hunt  and  couplet  reform — Keats  to  Mathew:  influence  of 
Browne — Calidore:  influence  of  Himt — Epistle  to  George  Keats — 
Epistle  to  Cowden  Clarke — Sleep  and  Poetry  and  I  stood  tip-toe — Analysis 
of  Sleep  and  Poetry — Double  invocation — ^Vision  of  the  Charioteer — 
Battle-cry  of  the  new  poetry — Its  strength  and  weakness — Challenge 
and  congratulation — ^Encouragements  acknowledged — Analysis  of  / 
stood  tip-toe — Intended  induction  to  Endymion — ^Relation  to  Eliza- 
bethans— Relation  to  contemporaries — Wordsworth  and  Greek  Mythol- 
ogy— Tintern  Abbey  and  the  three  stages — Contrasts  of  method — 
Evocation  versus  Exposition. 

The  note  of  Keats's  early  volume  is  accurately 
struck  in  the  motto  from  Spenser  which  he  prefixed 
to  it: —  v^ 

What  more  felicity  can  fall  to  creature 
Than  to  enjoy  delight  with  liberty? 

The  element  in  which  his  poetry  moves  is  liberty,  the 
consciousness  of  release  from  those  conventions  and 
restraints,  not  inherent  in  its  true  nature,  by  which 
the  art  had  for  the  last  hundred  years  been  hampered. 
And  the  spirit  which  animates  him  is  essentially  the 
spirit  of  delight:  delight  in  the  beauty  and  activities 
of  nature,  in  the  vividness  of  sensation,  in  the  charm 
of  fable  and  romance,  in  the  thoughts  of  friendship  and 

85 


86  SONNETS  AND  RIMED  HEROICS 

affection,  in  anticipations  of  the  future,  and  in  the 
exercise  of  the  art  itself  which  expresses  and  com- 
municates all  these  joys. 

Technically  considered,  the  volume  consists  almost 
entirely  of  experiments  in  two  metrical  forms:  the  one, 
the  Italian  sonnet  of  octave  and  sestet,  not  long  fully 
re-established  in  England  after  being  disused,  with  some 
exceptions,  since  Milton:  the  other,  the  decasyllabic  or 
five-stressed  couplet  first  naturalised  by  Chaucer,  revived 
by  the  Elizabethans  in  all  manner  of  uses,  narrative, 
dramatic,  didactic,  elegiac,  epistolary,  satiric,  and  em- 
ployed ever  since  as  the  predominant  English  metre  out- 
side of  lyric  and  drama.  The  only  exceptions  in  the 
volume  are  the  boyish  stanzas  in  imitation  of  Spenser, 
— truly  rather  of  Spenser's  eighteenth-century  imita- 
tors; the  Address  to  Hope  of  February  1815,  quite 
in  the  conventional  eighteenth-century  style  and 
diction,  though  its  form,  the  sextain  stanza,  is  ancient; 
the  two  copies  of  verses  To  some  Ladies  and  On  receiving 
a  curious  Shell  from  some  Ladies,  composed  for  the 
Misses  Mathew,  about  May  of  the  same  year,  in 
the  triple-time  jingle  most  affected  for  social  trifles 
from  the  days  of  Prior  to  those  of  Tom  Moore;  and 
the  set  of  seven-syllabled  couplets  drafted  in  February 
1816  for  George  Keats  to  send  as  a  valentine  to  Miss 
Wylie.  So  far  as  their  matter  goes  these  exceptions  call 
for  little  remark.  Both  the  sea-shell  verses  and  the 
valentine  spring  from  a  brain,  to  quote  a  phrase  of 
Keats's  own, 

— ^new  stuff' d  in  youth  with  triumphs  gay 
Of  old  romance, — 

especially  with  chivalric  images  and  ideas  from  Spenser. 
Of  the  second  set  of  shell  stanzas  it  may  perhaps  be 
noted  that  they  seem  to  suggest  an  acquaintance  with 
Oberon  and  Titania  not  only  through  the  Midsummer 
NigMs  Dream  but  through  Wieland's  Oberon,  sl  romance 
poem  which  Sotheby's  translation  had  made  well  known 
in  England  and  in  which  the  fairy  king  and  queen  are 


THE  CHAPMAN  SONNET  87 

divided  by  a  quarrel  far  deeper  and  more  durable  than 
in  Shakespeare's  play.^ 

Taking  first  the  score  or  so  of  sonnets  in  the  volume, 
we  find  that  none  of  them  are  love-sonnets  and  that  few 
are  written  in  any  high  mood  of  passion  or  exaltation. 
They  are  for  the  most  part  of  the  class  called  ^ occasional', 
— records  of  pleasant  experience,  addresses  of  friendly 
greeting  or  invocation,  or  compact  meditations  on  a 
single  theme.  They  bespeak  a  temper  cordial  and 
companionable  as  well  as  enthusiastic,  manifest  sincerity 
in  all  expressions  of  personal  feeling,  and  contain  here 
and  there  a  passage  of  fine  mature  poetry.  These, 
however,  are  seldom  sustained  for  more  than  a  single 
quatrain.  The  great  exception  of  course  is  the  sonnet, 
almost  too  well  known  to  quote, — ^but  I  will  quote  it 
nevertheless, — on  Chapman's  Homer.  That  walk  in  the 
morning  twilight  from  Clerkenwell  to  the  Borough  had 
enriched  our  language  with  what  is  by  common  consent 
one  of  its  masterpieces  in  this  form,  having  a  close 
unsurpassed  for  the  combined  qualities  of  serenity  and 
concentration:    concentration  twofold,  first  flashing  on 

*  The  lines  I  mean  are — 

This  canopy  mark:  'tis  the  work  of  a  fay; 

Beneath  its  rich  shade  did  King  Oberon  languish, 
When  lovely  Titania  was  far,  far  away, 

And  cruelly  left  him  to  sorrow,  and  anguish. 

Shakespeare's  hint  for  his  Oberon  and  Titania  was  taken,  as  is  well  known, 
from  the  French  prose  romance  Hv/m  of  Bordeaux  translated  by  Lord 
Berners.  The  plot  of  Wieland's  celebrated  poem  is  founded  entirely  on 
the  same  romance.  With  its  high-spiced  blend  of  the  marvellous  and  the 
voluptuous,  the  cynically  gay  and  the  heavily  moral  and  pathetic,  it  had 
a  considerable  vogue  in  Sotheby's  translation  (published  1798)  and  played 
a  part  in  the  Enghsh  romantic  movement  of  the  time.  There  are  several 
passages  in  Keats,  notably  in  The  Cap  and  Bells,  where  I  seem  to  catch 
a  strain  reminiscent  of  this  Oberon,  and  one  instance  where  a  definite 

Ehrase  from  it  seems  to  have  lingered  subconsciously  in  his  memory  and 
een  turned  to  gold,  thus: — 

Oft  in  this  speechless  language,  glance  on  glance, 
When  mute  the  tongue,  how  voluble  the  heart ! 

Oberon  c.  vi,  st.  17. 

No  utter'd  syllable,  or  woe  betide ! 
But  to  her  heart  her  heart  was  voluble. 

The  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  st.  23. 


88       THE  'HOW  MANY  BARDS'  SONNET 

our  mind's  eye  the  human  vision  of  the  explorer  and  his 
companions  with  their  looks  and  gestures,  then  sjm- 
bolically  evoking  through  that  vision  a  whole  world-wide 
range  of  the  emotions  of  discovery. 

Much  have  I  traveird  in  the  realms  of  gold,  > 

And  many  goodly  states  and  kingdoms  seen;     (^ 

Roimd  many  western  islands  have  I  been 
Which  bards  in  fealty  to  Apollo  hold. 
Oft  of  one  wide  expanse  had  I  been  told 

That  deep-brow'd  Homer  rul'd  as  his  demesne; 

Yet  did  I  never  breathe  its  pure  serene 
Till  I  heard  Chapman  speak  out  loud  and  bold: 
Then  felt  I  like  some  watcher  of  the  skies 

When  a  new  planet  swims  into  his  ken; 
Or  like  stout  Cortez  when  with  eagle  eyes 

He  star*d  at  the  Pacific — and  all  his  men 
Look'd  at  each  other  with  a  wild  surmise — 

Silent,  upon  a  peak  in  Darien. 

The  'realms  of  gold'  Hues  in  the  Chapman  sonnet, 
recording  Keats's  range  of  reading  in  our  older  poetry, 
had  been  in  a  measure  anticipated  in  this  other,  written 
six  months  earlier^: — 

How  many  bards  gild  the  lapses  of  time  I 
A  few  of  them  have  ever  been  the  food 
Of  my  delighted  fancy, — I  could  brood 

Over  their  beauties,  earthly,  or  sublime: 

And  often,  when  I  sit  me  down  to  rhyme. 

These  will  in  throngs  before  my  mind  intrude: 
But  no  confusion,  no  disturbance  rude 

Do  they  occasion;  'tis  a  pleasing  chime. 

So  the  unnumbered  sounds  that  evening  store; 
The  songs  of  birds — the  whisp'ring  of  the  leaves — 
The  voice  of  waters — the  great  bell  that  heaves 

With  solemn  sound, — and  thousand  others  more. 
That  distance  of  recognizance  bereaves. 

Make  pleasing  music,  and  not  wild  uproar. 

Technical  points  worth  attention  here  are  the  bold 
reversal  of  the  regular  accentual  stress  twice  over  in 
the  first  line,  and  the  strained  use  of  'store'  for  'fill' 
and   'recognizance'    for   'recognition.'    But   the   main 

1  March  1816  according  to  Woodhouse. 


THE  SEX-CHIVALRY  GROUP  89 

interest  of  the  sonnet  is  its  comparison  of  the  working 
of  Keats's  miscellaneous  poetic  reading  in  his  mind  and 
memory  with  the  effect  of  the  confused  but  harmonious 
sounds  of  evening  on  the  ear, — a  frank  and  illuminating 
comment  by  himself  on  those  stray  echoes  and  reminis- 
cences of  the  older  poets  which  we  catch  now  and  again 
throughout  his  work.  Such  echoes  and  reminiscences 
are  always  permitted  to  genius,  because  genius  cannot 
help  turning  whatever  it  takes  into  something  new  of 
its  own:  and  Keats  showed  himself  from  the  first  one  of 
those  chartered  borrowers  who  have  the  right  to  draw 
inspiration  as  they  please,  whether  direct  from  nature 
or,  in  the  phrase  of  Wordsworth, 

From  the  great  Nature  that  exists  in  works 
Of  mighty  poets.^ 

Compare  Shelley  in  the  preface  to  Prometheus  Unbound: 
— 'One  great  poet  is  a  masterpiece  of  natiKe  which 
another  not  only  ought  to  study  but  must  study.' 

Most  of  the  remaining  sonnets  can  best  be  taken  in 
groups,  each  group  centering  round  a  single  theme  or 
embodying  a  single  mood  or  vein  of  feeling.  One  is 
what  may  be  called  the  sex-chivalry  group,  including 
the  sequence  of  three  printed  separately  from  the  rest 
and  beginning,  'Woman,  when  I  behold  thee  flippant, 
vain';  that  beginning  'Had  I  a  man's  fair  form'; 
that  addressed  to  Georgiana  Wylie,  with  its  admirable 
opening,  'Nymph  of  the  downward  smile,  etc.,'  and  its 
rather  lame  conclusion;  to  which,  as  more  loosely 
connected  with  the  group,  and  touched  in  some  degree 
with  Byronic  suggestion,  may  be  added  'Happy  is 
England,  sweet  her  artless  daughters.'  That  excellent 
critic,  the  late  F.  T.  Palgrave,  had  a  singular  admiration 
for  the  set  of  three  which  I  have  placed  at  the  head  of 
this  group:  to  me  its  chief  interest  seems  not  poetical 
but  personal,  inasmuch  as  in  it  Keats  already  defines 
with  self-knowledge  the  peculiar  blend  in  his  nature  of 
ardent,  idealising  boyish  worship  of  woman  and  beauty 

1  The  Prelude,  book  v. 


90  THE  LEIGH  HUNT  GROUP 

with  an  acute  critical  sensitiveness  to  flaws  of  character 
defacing  his  ideal  in  actual  women:  a  sensitiveness 
which  grew  with  his  growth  and  many  a  time  afterwards 
put  him  ill  at  ease  with  his  company  and  himself. 

A  large  proportion  of  the  remaining  sonnets  centre 
themselves  more  or  less  closely  about  the  figure  of 
Leigh  Hunt.  Two  introduce  him  directly  by  name  and 
had  the  effect  of  definitely  marking  Keats  down,  in  the 
minds  of  reactionary  critics,  as  a  victim  to  be  swooped 
upon  in  association  with  Hunt  whenever  occasion 
offered.  The  two  are  the  early  sonnet  composed  on 
the  day  of  Hunt's  release  from  prison  (February  5,  1815), 
and  shewn  shyly  as  a  first  flight  to  Cowden  Clarke 
immediately  afterwards,  and  the  dedicatory  sonnet 
already  quoted  on  the  decay  of  the  old  pagan  beauty, 
written  almost  exactly  two  years  later.  Intermediate 
in  date  between  these  two  come  two  or  three  sonnets 
of  May  and  June  1816  which,  whether  inspired  directly 
or  not  by  intercourse  with  Hunt,  are  certainly  influenced 
by  his  writing,  and  express  a  townsman's  enjoyment 
of  country  walks  in  a  spirit  and  vocabulary  near  akin 
to  his: — ^To  one  who  has  been  long  in  city  pent'  (this 
opening  comes  with  only  the  change  of  a  word  from 
Paradise  Lost),  ^0  Solitude,  if  I  with  thee  must  dwell,' 
^  As  late  I  rambled  in  the  happy  fields.'  There  is  a 
memory  of  Wordsworth,  and  probably  also  of  Epping 
Forest  walks,  in  the  cry  to  Solitude : — 

Let  me  thy  vigils  keep 
'Mongst  boughs  pavillion'd,  where  the  deer's  swift  leap 
Startles  the  wild  bee  from  the  fox-glove  bell. 

Next  comes  the  autumn  group  definitely  recording  the 
happiness  received  by  the  young  poet  from  intercourse 
with  Hunt  and  his  friends,  from  the  society  of  his  brothers 
in  London,  and  from  walks  between  the  Hampstead 
cottage  and  in  their  city  lodgings: — 'Give  me  a  golden 
pen,'  'Small,  busy  flames  play  through  the  fresh-laid 
coals,'  'Keen,  fitful  gusts  are  whispering  here  and 
there':    to  which  may  be  added  the  sonnet  On  the 


THE  HAYDON  PAIR  91 

Grasshopper  and  Cricket  written  in  Hunt's  house  and 
in  friendly  competition  with  him. 

A  second  new  friend,  Haydon,  has  a  pair  of  sonnets 
in  the  volume  all  to  himself,  including  that  well-known 
one  which  brackets  him  with  Wordsworth  and  Leigh 
Hunt  among  great  spirits  destined  to  give  the  world 
another  heart  and  other  pulses.  A  few  of  the  sonnets 
stand  singly  apart  from  the  rest  by  their  subject  or 
occasion.  Such  is  the  sonnet  in  honour  of  the  Polish 
hero  Kosciusko;  and  such  again  is  that  addressed  to 
George  Keats  from  Margate,  with  its  fine  ocean  quatrain 
(Keats  was  always  well  inspired  in  writing  of  the  sea) : — 

The  ocean  with  its  vastness,  its  blue  green, 

Its  ships,  its  rocks,  its  caves,  its  hopes,  its  fears, 
Its  voice  mysterious,  which  whoso  hears 

Must  think  on  what  will  be,  and  what  has  been. 

Now  that  we  are  posthumously  acquainted  with  the 
other  sonnets  written  by  Keats  in  these  early  years  it 
is  a  little  difficult  to  see  qn  what  principle  he  made  his 
choice  of  the  specimens  to  be  published  in  this  1817 
volume.  Among  those  excluded,  he  may  well  have 
thought  the  early  attempts  on  the  peace  of  1814,  on 
Chatterton,  and  on  Byron,  too  feeble,  though  he  has 
included  others  scarcely  better.  That  headed  ^As 
from  the  darkening  gloom  a  silver  dove'  he  may  have 
counted  too  conventionally  pious;  and  that  satirizing 
the  starched  gloom  of  church-goers  too  likely  on  the 
other  hand  to  give  offence.  The  second  Haydon  pair, 
on  visiting  the  Elgin  marbles,  and  the  recently  discovered 
pair  on  receiving  a  laurel  crown  from  Leigh  Hunt,^  seem 
not  to  have  been  written  (as  that  on  the  Floure  and  the 
Lefe  certainly  was  not)  until  the  book  was  passing,  or 
had  passed,  the  press.  The  last-named  pair  he  would 
probably  have  had  the  good  sense  to  omit  in  any  case, 
as  he  has  the  sonnet  celebrating  a  like  laureation  at  the 
hands  of  a  young  lady  at  an  earHer  date.  But  why 
leave  out  'After  dark  vapours'  and  'Who  loves  to 
peer,'   and   above   all   why   the   admirable   sonnet   on 

*  See  above,  p.  68. 


92  THE  LEANDER  SONNET 

Leander?  The  date  of  this  was  March  16,  1816,  the 
occasion  the  gift  by  a  lady  of  one  of  James  Tassie's 
coloured  paste  reproductions  of  an  engraved  gem  of 
the  subject.  ^Tassie's  gems'  were  at  this  time 
immensely  popular  among  lovers  of  Grecian  taste, 
and  were  indeed  delightful  things,  though  his  originals 
were  too  uncritically  chosen  and  included  but  a  small 
proportion  of  true  antiques  among  a  multitude  of 
Renaissance  and  eighteenth-centujty  imitations.  Keats 
at  one  time  proposed  to  make  a  collection  of  them  for 
himself,  and  at  another  asked  his  young  sister  whether 
she  would  like  a  present  of  some.  The  sonnet  opens 
with  lines  curiously  recalling  those  invitations,  or 
invocations,  with  which  Dante  begins  some  of  his  sonnets 
in  the  Vita  Nvx)va}  The  last  three  lines  are  an  example, 
hardly  to  be  bettered,  of  condensed  expression  and  of 
imagination  kindHng  into  instantaneous  tragic  vitality 
a  cold  and  meagre  image  presented  to  the  eye. 

Come  hither  all  sweet  maidens  soberly, 

Down-looking  aye,  and  with  a  chastened  light 
Hid  in  the  fringes  of  your  eyeHds  white. 

And  meekly  let  your  fair  hands  joined  be, 

As  if  so  gentle  that  ye  could  not  see, 

Untouch'd,  a  victim  of  your  beauty  bright. 
Sinking  away  to  his  young  spirit's  night, — 

Sinking  bewildered  'mid  the  dreary  sea: 

'Tis  young  Leander  toiling  to  his  death; 
Nigh  swooning,  he  doth  purse  his  weary  lips 

For  Hero's'cheek,  and  smiles  against  her  smile. 
O  horrid  dream  I  see  how  his  body  dips 

Dead-heavy;  arms  and  shoulders  gleam  awhile: 

He's  gone:  up  bubbles  all  his  amorous  breath  P 

*  Particularly  Sonnet  XII: — 

Voi  che  portate  la  sembianza  umile, 
Cogli  occhi  bassi  mostrando  dolore. 

It  would  have  been  easy  to  suppose  that  Keats  had  learnt  something  of 
the  Vita  Nuova  through  Leigh  Hunt:  but  they  were  not  yet  acquainted 
when  he  wrote  the  Leander  sonnet,  so  that  the  resemblance  is  most  likely 
accidental. 

2  In  the  earlier  editions  this  sonnet  is  headed  On  a  victure  of  Leander, 
A  note  of  Woodhouse  (Houston  MSS.,  Transcripts  III)  puts  the  matter 


EPISTLES  93 

More  than  half  the  volume  is  taken  up  with  epistles 
and  meditative  pieces  (Drayton  would  have  called  them 
Elegies  and  Ben  Jonson  Epigrams)  in  the  regular  five- 
stressed  or  decasyllabic  couplet.  The  earliest  of  these 
is  the  epistle  to  Felton  Mathew  from  which  I  have 
already  given  a  quotation.  The  form  of  the  verse  in 
this  case  is  modelled  pretty  closely  on  Browne's 
Britannia^s  Pastorals.  Keats,  as  has  been  said,  was 
already  familiar  with  the  work  of  this  amiable  Spen- 
serian allegorist,  so  thin  and  tedious  in  the  allegorical 
part  of  his  work  proper,  in  romantic  invention  so  poorly 
inspired,  so  admirable,  genuine,  and  vivacious  on  the 
other  hand  in  his  scenes  and  similitudes  from  real 
west-coimtry  life  and  in  notes  of  patriotism  both 
local  and  national.  By  the  following  motto  chosen 
from  Browne's  work  Keats  seems  to  put  the  group  of 
Epistles  in  his  volume  under  that  poet's  particular 
patronage: — 

Among  the  rest  a  shepheard  (though  but  young 
Yet  hartned  to  his  pipe)  with  all  the  skill 
His  few  yeeres  could,  began  to  fit  his  quill. 

But  before  coming  to  questions  of  the  special  influences 
which  successively  shaped  Keats's  aims  both  as  to  style 
and  versification  in  poems  of  this  form,  I  shall  ask  the 
reader  to  pause  with  me  awhile  and  get  freshly  and 
familiarly  into  his  ear  and  mind,  what  to  special  students 
is  well  known  but  to  others  only  vaguely,  the  story  of 
the  chief  phases  which  this  most  characteristic  of 
English  measures  had  gone  through  until  the  time 
when  Keats  tried  to  handle  it  in  a  spirit  more  or  less 
revolutionary.  Some  of  the  examples  I  shall  quote  by 
way  of  illustration  are  passages  which  we  know  to  have 
been  specially  familiar  to  Keats  and  to  which  we  shall 
have  occasion  to  recur.    Let  us  first  consider  Chaucer's 

right  and  gives  the  date.  Which  particular  Leander  gem  of  Tassie's 
Keats  had  before  him  it  is  impossible  to  tell.  The  general  catalogue  of 
Tassie's  reproductions  gives  a  list  of  over  sixty  representing  Leander 
swimming  either  alone  or  with  Hero  looking  down  at  him  from  her  tower. 
Most  of  them  were  not  from  true  antiques  but  from  later  imitations. 


94    HISTORY  OF  THE  ^ HEROIC^  COUPLET 

use,  as  illustrated  in  a  part  of  the  prayer  of  Emilia  to 
Diana  in  the  Knightes  Tale : — 

0  chaste  goddesse  of  the  wodes  grene, 

To  whom  bothe  hevene  and  erthe  and  see  is  sene, 
Quene  of  the  regne  of  Pluto  derk  and  lowe, 
Goddesse  of  maydens,  that  myn  herte  hast  knowe 
Ful  many  a  yeer,  and  woost  what  I  desire, 
As  keep  me  fro  thy  vengeance  and  thyn  ire. 
That  Attheon  aboughte  cruelly. 
Chaste  goddesse,  wel  wostow  that  I 
Desire  to  been  a  mayden  al  my  lyf, 
Ne  never  wol  I  be  no  love  ne  wyf. 

1  am,  thou  woost,  yet  of  thy  companye, 
A  mayde,  and  love  hunting  and  venerye. 
And  for  to  walken  in  the  wodes  wilde. 

And  noght  to  been  a  wyf,  and  be  with  childe. 
Noght  wol  I  knowe  companye  of  man. 
Now  help  me,  lady,  sith  ye  may  and  can. 
For  tho  thre  formes  that  thou  hast  in  thee. 
And  Palamon,  that  hath  swich  love  to  me. 
And  eek  Arcite,  that  loveth  me  so  sore, 
This  grace  I  preye  thee  with-oute  more, 
As  sende  love  and  pees  bitwixte  hem  two; 
And  fro  me  tume  awey  hir  hertes  so. 
That  al  hir  bote  love,  and  hir  desyr. 
And  al  hir  bisy  torment,  and  hir  fyr 
Be  queynt,  or  turned  in  another  place; 
And  if  so  be  thou  wolt  not  do  me  grace. 
Or  if  my  destinee  be  shapen  so. 
That  I  shal  nedes  have  oon  of  hem  two, 
As  sende  me  him  that  most  desireth  me. 

The  rime-syllables  with  which  Chaucer  ends  his  lines 
are  as  a  rule  strong  and  followed  by  a  pause,  or  at  least 
by  the  grammatical  possibility  of  a  pause,  though  there 
are  exceptions  like  the  division  of  ^I  |  desire.'  The 
general  effect  of  the  metre  is  that  of  a  succession  of 
separate  couplets,  though  their  separation  is  often 
slight  and  the  sentence  is  allowed  to  run  on  with  little 
break  through  several  couplets  divided  from  each  other 
by  no  break  of  more  than  a  comma.  When  a  full  stop 
comes  and  ends  the  sentence,  it  is  hardly  ever  allowed 
to  break  a  line  by  falling  at  any  point  except  the  end. 


THE  CLOSED  AND  FREE  SYSTEMS       95 

On  the  other  hand  it  is  as  often  as  not  used  to  divide 
the  couplet  by  faUing  at  the  end  not  of  the  second  but 
of  the  first  Hne,  so  that  the  ear  has  to  wait  a  moment 
in  expectancy  until  the  second,  beginning  a  new 
sentence,  catches  up  the  rime  of  the  first  like  an  echo. 
Other,  slighter  pauses  fall  quite  variably  where  they 
will,  and  there  is  no  regular  breathing  pause  or  caesura 
dividing  the  line  after  the  second  or  third  stress. 

When  the  measure  was  revived  by  the  Elizabethans 
two  conflicting  tendencies  began  to  appear  in  its  treat- 
ment. One  was  to  end  each  line  with  a  full  and  strong 
rime-syllable,  noun  or  verb  or  emphatic  adjective,  and  to 
let  each  couplet  consist  of  a  single  sentence,  or  at  any  rate 
a  single  clause  of  a  sentence,  so  as  to  be  both  grammati- 
cally and  rhythmically  almost  independent  of  the  next. 
Under  this,  which  is  called  the  closed  or  stopped  couplet 
system,  the  rime-pattern  and  the  sense  or  sentence- 
pattern,  which  together  compose  the  formal  elements  in 
all  rimed  verse,  are  made  strictly  to  coincide,  and  within 
the  limits  of  a  couplet  no  full  break  of  the  sense  is  allowed. 
Rhetorical  and  epigrammatical  point  and  vigour  are  the 
special  virtues  of  this  system:  its  weaknesses  are  monot- 
ony of  beat  and  lack  of  freedom  and  variety  in  sentence 
structm*e.  The  other  and  opposite  tendency  is  to  suffer 
the  sentence  or  period  to  develop  itself  freely,  almost  as 
in  prose,  running  over  as  it  will  from  one  couplet  into 
another,  and  coming  to  a  full  pause  at  any  point  in  the 
Hne;  and  at  the  same  time  to  let  any  syllable  whatever, 
down  to  the  lightest  of  prepositions  or  auxiliaries,  serve 
at  need  as  a  rime-syllable.  Under  this  system  the  sense 
and  consequent  sentence-pattern  winds  in  and  out  of 
the  rime-pattern  variously  and  deviously,  the  rime-echo 
striking  upon  the  ear  now  with  emphasis,  now  lightly 
and  fugitively,  and  being  sometimes  held  up  to  follow 
a  full  pause  and  sometimes  hurried  on  with  the  merest 
suggestion  or  insinuation  of  a  possible  pause,  or  with 
none  at  all.  The  virtues  of  this  system  are  variety  and 
freedom  of  movement;  its  special  dangers  are  inverte- 
brateness  and  a  tendency  to  straggle  and  wind  itself 


96  MARLOWE 

free  of  all  real  observance  of  rime-effect  or  metrical 
law. 

Most  of  the  Elizabethans  used  both  systems  inter- 
changeably, now  a  string  of  closed  couplets,  and  now 
a  flowing  period  carried  through  a  succession  of  couplets 
overnmning  into  one  another.  Spenser  in  Mother 
Hubhard^s  Tale  and  Marlowe  in  Hero  and  Leander  were 
among  the  earliest  and  best  revivers  of  the  measure, 
and  both  incHned  to  the  closed  couplet  system,  Spenser 
the  more  strictly  of  the  two,  as  the  satiric  and  epigram- 
matic nature  of  his  theme  might  naturally  dictate. 
Let  us  take  a  well  known  passage  from  Marlowe : — 

It  lies  not  in  our  power  to  love  or  hate, 

For  will  in  us  is  over-ruled  by  fate. 

When  two  are  stript,  long  ere  the  course  begin. 

We  wish  that  one  should  lose,  the  other  win; 

And  one  especially  do  we  affect 

Of  two  gold  ingots,  like  in  each  respect: 

The  reason  no  man  knows;  let  it  suffice, 

What  we  behold  is  censured  by  our  eyes. 

Where  both  deliberate,  the  love  is  slight: 

Who  ever  loved,  that  loved  not  at  first  sight  ? 

He  kneeled;  but  unto  her  devoutly  prayed: 
Chaste  Hero  to  herself  thus  softly  said, 
*  Were  I  the  saint  he  worships,  I  would  hear  him;' 
And,  as  she  spake  those  words,  came  somewhat  near  him. 
He  started  up;  she  blushed  as  one  ashamed; 
Wherewith  Leander  much  more  was  inflamed. 
He  touched  her  hand;  in  touching  it  she  trembled: 
Love  deeply  grounded,  hardly  is  dissembled. 
These  lovers  parled  by  the  touch  of  hands: 
li  True  love  is  mute,  and  oft  amazed  stands. 

Thus  while  dumb  signs  their  yielding  hearts  entangled. 
The  air  with  sparks  of  living  fire  was  spangled; 
And  Night,  deep-drenched  in  misty  Acheron, 
Heaved  up  her  head,  and  half  the  world  upon 
Breathed  darkness  forth  (dark  night  is  Cupid's  day). 

The  first  ten  lines,  conveying  moral  saws  or  maxims, 
furnish  almost  a  complete  example  of  the  closed  couplet 
system,  and  not  only  of  that,  but  of  the  division  of 
single  lines  by  a  pause  or  caesura  after  the  second  or 


DRAYTON  97 

third  stress.  When  the  narrative  begins,  the  verse 
moves  still  mainly  in  detached  couplets  (partly  because 
a  line  of  moral  reflection  is  now  and  again  paired  with 
a  line  of  narrative),  but  with  a  growing  inclination  to 
prolong  the  sentence  and  vary  the  rhythm,  and  with  an 
abundant  use,  in  the  rimes,  of  the  double  or  feminine 
ending,  for  which  Chaucer  affords  precedent  enough. 

Drayton,  a  poet  in  whom  Keats  was  well  read,  is 
commonly  quoted  as  one  who  yielded  habitually  to  the 
attraction  of  the  closed  couplet;  and  indeed  he  will 
often  run  on  through  page  on  page  of  twinned  verses, 
or  *gemells'  as  he  calls  them,  hke  these  from  the 
imaginary  Epistle  from  Eleanor  Cobham  to  Duke 
Humphrey: — 

Why,  if  thou  wilt,  I  will  myself  deny. 

Nay,  I'll  affirm  and  swear,  I  am  not  I: 

Or  if  in  that  thy  shame  thou  dost  perceive, 

Lo,  for  thy  dear  sake,  I  my  name  will  leave. 

And  yet,  me  thinks,  amaz'd  thou  shouldst  not  stand. 

Nor  seem  so  much  appalled  at  my  hand; 

For  my  misfortunes  have  inur'd  thine  eye 

(Long  before  this)  to  sights  of  misery. 

No,  no,  read  on,  'tis  I,  the  very  same. 

All  thou  canst  read,  is  but  to  read  my  shame. 

Be  not  dismay 'd,  nor  let  my  name  affright; 

The  worst  it  can,  is  but  t'  offend  thy  sight; 

It  cannot  wound,  nor  do  thee  deadly  harm. 

It  is  no  dreadful  spell,  no  magic  charm. 

But  Drajrton  is  also  very  capable  of  the  full-flowing 
period  and  the  loose  over-run  of  couplet  into  couplet,  as 
witness  the  following  from  one  of  his  epistles: — 

O  God,  though  Virtue  mightily  do  grieve 
For  all  this  world,  yet  will  I  not  believe 
But  that  she's  fair  and  lovely  and  that  she 
So  to  the  period  of  the  world  will  be; 
Else  had  she  been  forsaken  (sure)  of  all, 
For  that  so  many  sundry  mischiefs  fall 
Upon  her  daily,  and  so  many  take 
Up  arms  against  her,  as  it  well  might  make 
Her  to  forsake  her  nature,  and  behind 
To  leave  no  step  for  future  time  behind. 


98  WILLIAM  BROWNE 

As  she  had  never  been,  for  he  that  now 
Can  do  her  most  disgrace,  him  they  allow 
The  time's  chief  Champion — . 

Turning  to  Keats's  next  favourite  among  the  old 
poets,  WiUiam  Browne  of  Tavistock,  here  is  a  passage 
from  Britannia^  s  Pastorals  which  we  know  to  have  stuck 
in  his  memory,  and  which  illustrates  the  prevailing 
tendency  of  the  metre  in  Browne's  hands  to  run  in  a 
succession  of  closed,  but  not  too  tightly  closed,  couplets, 
and  to  abound  in  double  or  feminine  rime-endings 
which  make  a  variation  in  the  beat : — 

And  as  a  lovely  maiden,  pure  and  chaste. 

With  naked  iv'ry  neck,  and  gown  unlaced. 

Within  her  chamber,  when  the  day  is  fled. 

Makes  poor  her  garments  to  enrich  her  bed: 

First,  put  she  off  her  lily-silken  gown. 

That  shrieks  for  sorrow  as  she  lays  it  down; 

And  with  her  arms  graceth  a  waistcoat  fine, 

Embracing  her  as  it  would  ne'er  untwine. 

Her  flaxen  hair,  ensnaring  all  beholders. 

She  next  permits  to  wave  about  her  shoulders. 

And  though  she  cast  it  back,  the  silken  slips 

Still  forward  steal  and  hang  upon  her  lips: 

Whereat  she  sweetly  angry,  with  her  laces 

Binds  up  the  wanton  locks  in  curious  traces. 

Whilst  (twisting  with  her  joints)  each  hair  long  lingers. 

As  loth  to  be  enchain'd  but  with  her  fingers. 

Then  on  her  head  a  dressing  like  a  crown; 

Her  breasts  all  bare,  her  kirtle  slipping  down. 

And  all  things  off  (which  rightly  ever  be 

Call'd  the  foul-fair  marks  of  our  misery) 

Except  her  last,  which  enviously  doth  seize  her. 

Lest  any  eye  partake  with  it  in  pleasure. 

Prepares  for  sweetest  rest,  while  sylvans  greet  her. 

And  longingly  the  down  bed  swells  to  meet  her. 

Chapman,  a  poet  naturally  rugged  of  mind  and  speech 
and  moreover  hampered  by  having  to  translate,  takes 
much  greater  liberties,  constantly  breaking  up  single 
lines  with  a  full  stop  in  the  middle  and  riming  on  syl- 
lables too  light  or  too  grammatically  dependent  on  the 
word  next  following  to  allow  naturally  any  stress  of 


CHAPMAN  AND  SANDYS  99 

after-pause,    however    slight;     as    thus    in    the    sixth 
Odyssey: — 

These,  here  arriv'd,  the  mules  uncoach'd,  and  drave 
Up  to  the  gulfy  river's  shore,  that  gave 
Sweet  grass  to  them.     The  maids  from  coach  then  took 
Their  clothes,  and  steep'd  them  in  the  sable  brook; 
Then  put  them  into  springs,  and  trod  them  clean 
With  cleanly  feet;  adventuring  wagers  then. 
Who  should  have  soonest  and  most  cleanly  done. 
When  having  throughly  cleans'd,  they  spread  them  on 
The  flood's  shore,  all  in  order.     And  then,  where 
The  waves  the  pebbles  wash'd,  and  ground  was  clear. 
They  bath'd  themselves,  and  all  with  glittering  oil 
Smooth'd  their  white  skins;  refreshing  then  their  toil 
With  pleasant  dinner,  by  the  river's  side; 
Yet  still  watch'd  when  the  sun  their  clothes  had  dried. 
Till  which  time,  having  dined,  Nausicaa 
With  other  virgins  did  at  stool-ball  play. 
Their  shoulder-reaching  head-tires  laying  by. 

The  other  classical  translation  of  the  time  with  which 
Keats  was  most  familiar  was  that  of  the  Metamorphoses 
of  Ovid  by  the  traveller  and  colonial  administrator 
George  Sandys.  As  a  rule  Sandys  prefers  the  regular 
beat  of  the  self-contained  couplet,  but  now  and  again 
he  too  breaks  it  uncompromisingly :  for  instance, — 

Forbear  yourselves,  O  Mortals,  to  pollute 

With  wicked  food:  fields  smile  with  corn,  ripe  fruit 

Weighs  down  their  boughs;  plump  grapes  their  vines  attire; 

There  are  sweet  herbs,  and  savory  roots,  which  fire 

May  mollify,  milk,  honey  redolent 

With  flowers  of  thyme,  thy  palate  to  content. 

The  prodigal  earth  abounds  with  gentle  food; 

Affording  banquets  without  death  or  blood. 

Brute  beasts  with  flesh  their  ravenous  hunger  cloy: 

And  yet  not  all;  in  pastures  horses  joy: 

So  flocks  and  herds.     But  those  whom  Nature  hath 

Endued  with  cruelty,  and  savage  wrath 

(Wolves,  bears,  Armenian  tigers.  Lions)  in 

Hot  blood  delight.     How  horrible  a  sin. 

That  entrails  bleeding  entrails  should  entomb  I 

That  greedy  flesh,  by  flesh  should  fat  become ! 

While  by  one  creature's  death  another  lives  I 


100         DECAY  OF  THE  FREE  SYSTEM 

Contemporary  masters  of  elegiac  and  epistolary  verse 
often  deal  with  the  metre  more  harshly  and  arbi- 
trarily still.  Thus  Donne,  the  great  Dean  of  St  Paulas, 
though  capable  of  riming  with  fine  sonority  and  rich- 
ness, chooses  sometimes  to  write  as  though  in  sheer 
defiance  of  the  obvious  framework  offered  by  the 
couplet  system;  and  the  same  refusal  to  stop  the 
sense  with  the  couplet,  the  same  persistent  slurring 
of  the  rime,  the  same  broken  and  jerking  movement, 
are  plentifully  to  be  matched  from  the  epistles  of 
Ben  Jonson.  In  later  and  weaker  hands  this  method 
of  letting  the  sentence  march  or  jolt  upon  its  way 
in  almost  complete  independence  of  the  rime  developed 
into  a  fatal  disease  and  decay  of  the  metre,  analogous 
to  the  disease  which  at  the  same  time  was  overtaking 
and  corrupting  dramatic  blank  verse.  A  signal  instance, 
to  which  we  shall  have  to  return,  is  the  Pharonnida 
of  William  Chamberlayne  (1659),  a  narrative  poem  not 
lacking  momentary  gleams  of  intellect  and  imagination, 
and  by  some  insatiate  students,  including  Southey  and 
Professor  Saintsbury,  admired  and  praised  in  spite  of 
its  (to  one  reader  at  least)  intolerable  tedium  and 
wretched  stumbling,  shuffling  verse,  which  rimes  indeed 
to  the  eye  but  to  the  ear  is  mere  mockery  and  vexation. 
For  example: — 

Some  time  in  silent  sorrow  spent,  at  length 

The  fair  Pharonnida  recovers  strength, 

Though  sighs  each  accent  interrupted,  to 

Return  this  answer: — *  Wilt,  oh !  wilt  thou  do 

Our  infant  love  such  injury — to  leave 

It  ere  full  grown  ?    When  shall  my  soul  receive 

A  comfortable  smile  to  cherish  it. 

When  thou  art  gone  ?    They're  but  dull  joys  that  sit 

Enthroned  in  fruitless  wishes;  yet  I  could 

Part,  with  a  less  expense  of  sorrow,  would 

Our  rigid  fortune  only  be  content 

With  absence;  but  a  greater  punishment 

Conspires  against  us — Danger  must  attend 

Each  step  thou  tread'st  from  hence;  and  shall  I  spend 

Those  hours  in  mirth,  each  of  whose  minutes  lay 

Wait  for  thy  life?    When  Fame  proclaims  the  day 


WILLIAM  CHAMBERLAYNE  101 

Wherein  your  battles  join,  how  will  my  fear 

With  doubtful  pulses  beat,  until  I  hear 

Whom  victory  adorns  !    Or  shall  I  rest 

Here  without  trembling,  when,  lodged  in  thy  breast, 

My  heart's  exposed  to  every  danger  that 

Assails  thy  valour,  and  is  wounded  at 

Each  stroke  that  lights  on  thee — which  absent  I, 

Prompted  by  fear,  to  myriads  multiply. 

The  tendency  which  culminated  in  this  kind  of  verse 
was  met  by  a  counteracting  tendency  in  the  majority  of 
poets  to  insist  on  the  regular  emphatic  rime-beat,  and 
to  establish  the  rime-unit — that  is  the  separate  couplet 
— as  the  completely  dominant  element  in  the  measure, 
the  ^heroic'  measure  as  it  had  come  to  be  called.  The 
rule  is  nowhere  so  dogmatically  laid  down  as  by  Sir 
John  Beaumont,  the  elder  brother  of  the  dramatist,  in 
an  address  to  King  James  I : — 

In  every  language  now  in  Europe  spoke 
By  nations  which  the  Roman  Empire  broke. 
The  relish  of  the  Muse  consists  in  rime: 
One  verse  must  meet  another  like  a  chime. 
Our  Saxon  shortness  hath  peculiar  grace 
In  choice  of  words  fit  for  the  ending  place, 
Which  leave  impression  in  the  mind  as  well 
As  closing  sounds  of  some  delightful  bell. 

Milton  at  nineteen,  in  a  passage  of  his  college  Vacation 
Exercise,  familiar  to  Keats  and  for  every  reason  interest- 
ing to  read  in  connexion  with  the  poems  expressing 
Keats's  early  aspirations,  showed  how  the  metre  could 
stiU  be  handled  nobly  in  the  mixed  EKzabethan 
manner: — 

Hail  native  Language,  that  by  sinews  weak 

Didst  move  my  first  endeavouring  tongue  to  speak, 

I  have  some  naked  thoughts  that  rove  about 
And  loudly  knock  to  have  their  passage  out; 
And  wearie  of  their  place  do  only  stay 
Till  thou  hast  deck't  them  in  thy  best  array; 
That  so  they  may  without  suspect  or  fears 
Fly  swiftly  to  this  fair  Assembly's  ears; 


102  MILTON  AND  MARVELL 

Yet  I  had  rather  if  I  were  to  chuse. 

Thy  service  in  some  graver  subject  use, 

Such  as  may  make  thee  search  thy  coffers  round. 

Before  thou  cloath  my  fancy  in  fit  sound: 

Such  where  the  deep  transported  mind  may  soare 

Above  the  wheeling  poles,  and  at  Heav'ns  dore  ) 

Look  in,  and  see  each  blissful  Deitie 

How  he  before  the  thunderous  throne  doth  lie. 

Listening  to  what  unshorn  Apollo  sings 

To  th'  touch  of  golden  wires,  while  Hebe  brings 

Immortal  Nectar  to  her  Kingly  Sire: 

Then  passing  through  the  Spheres  of  watchful  fire. 

And  mistie  Regions  of  wide  air  next  under. 

And  hills  of  Snow  and  lofts  of  piled  Thunder, 

May  tell  at  length  how  green-ey'd  Neptune  raves. 

In  Heav'ns  defiance  mustering  all  his  waves; 

Then  sing  of  secret  things  that  came  to  pass 

When  Beldam  Nature  in  her  cradle  was; 

And  last  of  Kings  and  Queens  and  Hero's  old. 

Such  as  the  wise  Demodocus  once  told 

In  solemn  Songs  at  King  Alcinous  feast. 

While  sad  Ulisses  soul  and  all  the  rest 

Are  held  with  his  melodious  harmonic 

In  willing  chains  and  sweet  captivitie. 

But  the  strictly  closed  system  advocated  by  Sir  John 
Beaumont  prevaHed  in  the  main,  and  by  the  days  of  the 
Commonwealth  and  Restoration  was  with  some  excep- 
tions generally  established.  Some  poets  were  enabled 
by  natural  fineness  of  ear  and  dignity  of  soul  to  make  it 
yield  fine  rich  and  rolHng  modulations:  none  more  so 
than  Andrew  Marvell,  as  for  instance  in  his  noble  poem 
on  the  death  of  Cromwell.  The  name  especially  associ- 
ated in  contemporary  and  subsequent  criticism  with 
the  attainment  of  the  admired  quality  of  'smoothness' 
(another  name  for  clipped  and  even  monotony  of  rime 
and  rhythm)  in  this  metre  is  Waller,  the  famous  parlia- 
mentary and  poetical  turncoat  who  could  adulate  with 
equal  unction  first  the  Lord  Protector  and  then  the 
restored  Charles.  By  this  time,  however,  every  rimer 
could  play  the  tune,  and  thanks  to  the  controlling  and 
suggesting  power  of  the  metre  itself,  could  turn  out 
couplets  with  the  true  metallic  and  epigrammatic  ring: 


WALLER:    KATHERINE  PHILLIPS        103 

few  better  than  Katherine  Phillips  ('the  matchless 
OrindaO,  who  was  a  stickler  for  the  strictest  form  of 
the  couplet  and  wished  even  to  banish  all  double 
endings.  Take  this  from  her  elegy  on  the  death  of 
Elizabeth,  Queen  of  Bohemia  (1662) : — 

Although  the  most  do  with  officious  heat 
Only  adore  the  living  and  the  great, 
Yet  this  Queen's  merits  Fame  so  far  hath  spread. 
That  she  rules  still,  though  dispossest  and  dead. 
For  losing  one,  two  other  Crowns  remained; 
Over  all  hearts  and  her  own  griefs  she  reigned. 
Two  Thrones  so  splendid  as  to  none  are  less 
But  to  that  third  which  she  does  now  possess. 
Her  heart  and  birth  Fortune  as  well  did  know. 
That  seeking  her  own  fame  in  such  a  foe. 
She  drest  the  spacious  theatre  for  the  fight: 
And  the  admiring  World  call'd  to  the  sight: 
An  army  then  of  mighty  sorrows  brought. 
Who  all  against  this  single  virtue  fought; 
And  sometimes  stratagems,  and  sometimes  blows. 
To  her  heroic  soul  they  did  oppose: 
But  at  her  feet  their  vain  attempts  did  fall. 
And  she  discovered  and  subdu'd  them  all. 

Cowley  in  his  long  'heroic'  poem  The  Davideis  admits 
the  occasional  Alexandrine  or  twelve-syllable  line  as  a 
variation  on  the  monotony  of  the  rhythm.  Dryden, 
with  his  incomparably  sounder  and  stronger  literary 
sense,  saw  the  need  for  a  richer  variation  yet,  and 
obtained  it  by  the  free  use  both  of  triple  rimes  and  of 
Alexandrines:  often  getting  fine  effects  of  sweeping 
sonority,  although  by  means  which  the  reader  cannot 
but  feel  to  be  arbitrary,  imported  into  the  form 
because  its  monotony  calls  for  relief  rather  than 
intrinsic  and  natural  to  it.  Chaucer's  prayer,  above 
quoted,  of  EmiHa  to  Diana  runs  thus  in  Dryden's 
'translation': — 

O  Goddess,  Haunter  of  the  Woodland  Green, 

To  whom  both  Heav'n  and  Earth  and  Seas  are  seen; 

Queen  of  the  nether  Skies,  where  half  the  Year 

Thy  Silver  Beams  descend,  and  light  the  gloomy  Sphere; 


104  DRYDEN 

Goddess  of  Maids,  and  conscious  of  our  Hearts, 

So  keep  me  from  the  Vengeance  of  thy  Darts, 

Which  Niobe's  devoted  Issue  felt. 

When  hissing  through  the  Skies  the  feathered  Deaths  were  dealt: 

As  I  desire  to  live  a  Virgin-life, 

Nor  know  the  Name  of  Mother  or  of  Wife. 

Thy  Votress  from  my  tender  Years  I  am. 

And  love,  like  thee,  the  Woods  and  Sylvan  Game. 

Like  Death,  thou  know'st,  I  loath  the  Nuptial  State, 

And  Man,  the  Tyrant  of  our  Sex,  I  hate, 

A  lowly  Servant,  but  a  lofty  Mate. 

Where  Love  is  Duty  on  the  Female  Side, 

On  theirs  mere  sensual  Gust,  and  sought  with  surly  Pride. 

Now  by  thy  triple  Shape,  as  thou  art  seen 

In  Heav*n,  Earth,  Hell,  and  ev'ry  where  a  Queen, 

Grant  this  my  first  Desire;  let  Discord,  cease. 

And  make  betwixt  the  Rivals  lasting  Peace: 

Quench  their  hot  Fire,  or  far  from  me  remove 

The  Flame,  and  turn  it  on  some  other  Love. 

Or  if  my  frowning  Stars  have  so  decreed. 

That  one  must  be  rejected,  one  succeed. 

Make  him  my  Lord,  within  whose  faithful  Breast 

Is  fix'd  my  Image,  and  who  loves  me  best. 

In  serious  work  Dryden  avoided  double  endings 
almost  entirely,  reserving  them  for  playful  and  collo- 
quial use  in  stage  prologues,  epilogues,  and  the  like, 
thus: — 

I  come,  kind  Gentlemen,  strange  news  to  tell  ye; 

I  am  the  Ghost  of  poor  departed  Nelly. 

Sweet  Ladies,  be  not  frighted;  I'll  be  civil; 

I'm  what  I  was,  a  little  harmless  Devil. 

For,  after  death,  we  Sprights  have  just  such  Natures, 

We  had,  for  all  the  World,  when  human  Creatures. 

In  the  following  generation  Pope  discarded,  with  the 
rarest  exceptions,  all  these  variations  upon  the  metre 
and  wrought  up  successions  of  separate  couplets,  each 
containing  a  single  sentence  or  clause  of  a  sentence 
complete,  and  each  line  having  its  breathing-pause  or 
caesura  almost  exactly  in  the  same  place,  to  a  pitch  of 
polished  and  glittering  elegance,  of  striking,  instan- 
taneous effect  both  upon  ear  and  mind,  which  completely 


POPE  AND  HIS  ASCENDENCY  105 

dazzled  and  subjugated  not  only  his  contemporaries 
but  three  full  generations  of  rimers  and  readers  after 
them.  Ever^'one  knows  the  tune;  it  is  the  same 
whether  applied  to  purposes  of  pastoral  sentiment  or 
rhetorical  passion  or  playful  fancy,  of  Homeric  trans- 
lation or  Horatian  satire,  of  witty  and  plausible  moral 
and  critical  reflection  or  of  savage  personal  lampoon  and 
invective.  Let  the  reader  tiu^n  in  memory  from  Ariel's 
account  of  the  duties  of  his  subordinate  elves  and 
fays:— 

Some  in  the  fields  of  purest  ether  play. 

And  bask  and  whiten  in  the  blaze  of  day: 

Some  guide  the  course  of  wandering  orbs  on  high. 

Or  roll  the  planets  through  the  boundless  sky: 

Some,  less  refin'd,  beneath  the  moon's  pale  light 

Pursue  the  stars  that  shoot  athwart  the  night. 

Or  suck  the  mists  in  grosser  air  below, 

Or  dip  their  pinions  in  the  painted  bow, 

Or  brew  fierce  tempests  on  the  wintry  main. 

Or  o'er  the  glebe  distil  the  kindly  rain. 

Others,  on  earth,  o'er  human  race  preside. 

Watch  all  their  ways,  and  all  their  actions  guide, — 

let  the  reader  turn  in  memory  from  this  to  the  familiarly 
known  lines  in  which  Pope  congratulates  himself 

That  not  in  fancy's  maze  he  wandered  long. 
But  stoop'd  to  truth,  and  moraHz'd  his  song; 
That  not  for  fame,  but  virtue's  better  end. 
He  stood  the  furious  foe,  the  timid  friend. 
The  damning  critic,  half  approving  wit. 
The  coxcomb  hit,  or  fearing  to  be  hit; 
Laughed  at  the  loss  of  friends  he  never  had. 
The  dull,  the  proud,  the  wicked,  and  the  mad; 
The  distant  threats  of  vengeance  on  his  head. 
The  blow  unfelt,  the  tear  he  never  shed; 
The  tale  revived,  the  lie  so  oft  o'erthrown. 
The  imputed  trash,  and  dulness  not  his  own, — 

and  again  from  this  to  his  castigation  of  the  imhappy 
Bayes : — 

Swearing  and  supperless  the  hero  sate, 
Blasphem'd  his  gods,  the  dice,  and  damn'd  his  fate; 


106  REACTION:  THE  BROTHERS  WARTON 

Then  gnawM  his  pen,  then  dash'd  it  on  the  ground, 
Sinking  from  thought  to  thought,  a  vast  profound  I 
Plunged  for  his  sense,  but  found  no  bottom  there. 
Yet  wrote  and  flounder'd  on  in  mere  despair. 
Round  him  much  embryo,  much  abortion  lay. 
Much  future  ode,  and  abdicated  play; 
Nonsense  precipitate,  like  running  lead. 
That  slipped  through  cracks  and  zigzags  of  the  head. 

The  author  thus  brilliantly  and  evenly  accomplished  in 
one  metre  and  so  many  styles  ruled  as  a  sovereign  long 
after  his  death,  his  works  being  published  in  nearly 
thirty  editions  before  the  end  of  the  century;  and 
the  measure  as  thus  fixed  and  polished  by  him  became 
for  a  full  hundred  years  the  settled  norm  and  standard 
for  English  'heroic'  verse,  the  length  and  structure  of 
periods,  sentences  and  clauses  having  to  be  rigidly  clipped 
to  fit  it.  In  this  respect  no  change  of  practice  came 
till  after  the  whole  spirit  of  English  poetry  had  been 
changed.  Almost  from  Pope's  own  day  the  leaven 
destined  to  produce  what  came  afterwards  to  be  called 
the  romantic  revolution  was  working,  in  the  main 
unconsciously,  in  men's  minds.  Of  conscious  rebels 
or  pioneers,  two  of  the  chief  were  that  admirable, 
ridiculous  pair  of  clerical  brothers  Joseph  and  Thomas 
Warton,  Joseph  long  headmaster  of  Winchester,  Thomas 
professor  of  poetry  at  Oxford  and  later  poet  laureate. 
Joseph  Warton  made  at  twenty-four,  within  two  years 
of  Pope's  death,  a  formal  protest  against  the  reign  of  the 
polished  and  urbane  moral  essay  in  verse,  and  at  all 
times  stoutly  maintained  'Invention  and  Imagination' 
to  be  the  chief  quahties  of  a  poet;  illustrating  his  views 
by  what  he  called  odes,  to  us  sadly  uninspired,  of  his 
own  composition.  His  younger  brother  Thomas,  with  his 
passion  for  Gothic  architecture,  his  masterly  editing 
of  Spenser,  and  his  profoimd  labours  on  the  origin  and 
history  of  our  native  English  poetry,  carried  within  him, 
for  all  his  grotesque  personality,  many  of  the  germs  of 
the  spirit  that  was  to  animate  the  coming  age.  As  the 
century  advanced,  other  signs  and  portents  of  what  was 
to  come  were  Chatterton's  audaciously  brilHant  blunder 


SYMPTOMS  OF  EMANCIPATION         107 

of  the  Rowley  forgeries,  with  the  interest  which  it  excited, 
the  profound  impression  created  by  the  pseudo-Ossian 
of  Macpherson,  and  the  enthusiastic  reception  of  Percy's 
Reliques.  But  current  critical  taste  did  not  recognize 
the  meaning  of  these  signs,  and  tacitly  treated  the  breach 
between  our  older  and  newer  literatures  as  complete. 
Admitting  the  older  as  a  worthy  and  interesting  subject 
of  study  and  welcoming  the  labour  of  scholars — even 
those  of  pretended  scholars — in  collecting  and  publishing 
its  remains  or  what  purported  to  be  such,  criticism  none 
the  less  expected  and  demanded  of  contemporary 
production  that  it  should  conform  as  a  matter  of  course 
to  the  standards  established  since  language  and  style 
had  been  ^polished'  and  reduced  to  'correctness'  by 
Dryden  and  Pope.  Thomas  Warton,  wishing  to  celebrate 
in  verse  the  glories  of  the  Gothic  architecture  of  Oxford, 
finds  himself  constrained  to  do  so  strictly  in  the  dominant 
style  and  measure.  His  brother,  the  protesting  Joseph, 
actually  has  to  enrol  himself  among  Pope's  editors,  and 
when  for  once  he  uses  the  heroic  couplet  and  lets  his 
fancy  play  upon  the  sight  of  a  butterfly  in  Hackwood 
Park,  must  do  so,  he  too,  in  this  thoroughly  Popeian 
wise: — 

Fair  child  of  Sun  and  Summer,  we  behold 
With  eager  eyes  thy  wings  bedropp^d  with  gold; 
The  purple  spots  that  o'er  thy  mantle  spread. 
The  sapphire's  lively  blue,  the  ruby's  red, 
Ten  thousand  various  blended  tints  surprise. 
Beyond  the  rainbow's  hues  or  peacock's  eyes: 
Not  Judah's  king  in  eastern  pomp  array'd. 
Whose  charms  allur'd  from  far  the  Sheban  maid. 
High  on  his  glitt'ring  throne,  like  you  could  shine 
(Nature's  completest  miniature  divine) : 
For  thee  the  rose  her  balmy  buds  renews, 
And  silver  lillies  fill  their  cups  with  dews; 
Flora  for  thee  the  laughing  fields  perfumes. 
For  thee  Pomona  sheds  her  choicest  blooms. 

William  Blake,  in  his  Poetical  Sketches  of  1784,  poured 
scorn  on  the  still  reigning  fashion  for  Hinkling  rhymes 
and    elegances    terse',    and    himself    struck    wonderful 


108   COLERIDGE,  WORDSWORTH  AND  SCOTT 

lyric  notes  in  the  vein  of  our  older  poetry:  but  nobody 
read  or  marked  Blake:  he  was  not  for  his  own  age 
but  for  posterity.  Even  those  of  the  eighteenth-century 
poets  who  in  the  main  avoided  the  heroic  couplet,  and 
took  refuge,  like  Thomson,  in  the  Spenserian  stanza  or 
Mil  tonic  blank  verse,  or  confined  themselves  to  lyric 
or  elegiac  work  like  Gray, — even  they  continued  to 
be  hampered  by  a  strict  conventional  and  artificial 
code  of  poetic  style  and  diction.  The  first  full  and 
effective  note  of  emancipation,  of  poetical  revolution 
and  expansion,  in  England  was  that  struck  by  Coleridge 
and  Wordsworth  with  the  publication  and  defence  of 
their  Lyrical  Ballads  (1798,  1800).  Both  these  young 
masters  had  written  in  the  established  mould  in  their 
quite  earliest  work,  but  afterwards  disused  it  almost 
entirely  (The  Happy  Warrior  is  of  course  a  conspicuous 
exception);  while  their  contemporary  Walter  Scott 
avoided  it  from  the  first. 

The  new  poetry,  whether  cast  in  forms  derived  from 
or  coloured  by  the  old  ballad  literature  of  the  country, 
or  helping  itself  from  the  simplicities  and  directnesses 
of  common  every-day  speech,  or  going  back  to  Miltonic 
and  pre-Miltonic  tradition,  fought  its  way  to  recognition 
now  slowly,  as  in  the  case  of  Wordsworth,  in  whose  style 
all  these  three  elements  play  their  part,  now  rapidly  in 
the  face  of  all  opposition,  as  in  the  case  of  Scott  with 
his  dashing  Border  lays.  But  the  heroic  couplet  on  the 
Queen  Anne  model  still  held  the  field  as  the  reigning 
and  official  form  of  verse;  and  among  the  most  admired 
poets  of  Keats^s  day,  Rogers,  Campbell,  and  Crabbe  in 
the  older  generation,  each  in  his  own  manner,  still  kept 
sounding  the  old  instrument  essentially  to  the  old  tune, 
with  Byron  in  the  younger  following,  in  The  Corsair 
and  Lara,  at  a  pace  more  rapid  and  helter-skelter  but 
with  a  beat  even  more  monotonous  and  hammering  than 
any  of  theirs.  We  have  seen  how  Leigh  Hunt  declared 
his  intention  to  try  a  reform  of  the  measure,  and  how 
he  carried  out  his  promise  in  Rimini.  He  did  little 
more  than  revive  Dryden's  expedients  of  the  occasional 


LEIGH  HUNT  AND  COUPLET  REFORM    109 

triplet  and  Alexandrine,  with  a  sprinkling  of  Elizabethan 
double-endings;  failing  withal  completely  to  catch  any 
touch  either  of  the  imaginative  passion  of  the  Eliza- 
bethans or  of  Dryden's  fine  virile  energy  and  worldly 
good-breeding. 

Rimini  was  not  yet  pubhshed,  nor  had  Keats  yet  met 
its  author,  when  Keats  wrote  his  Epistle  to  Felton 
Mathew  in  November  1815.  If,  as  is  the  case,  his 
strain  of  social  ease  and  sprightliness  jars  on  us  a  little 
in  the  same  manner  as  Hunt's,  it  is  that  there  was  reaUy 
as  he  himself  said  on  another  occasion,  something  in 
common  between  them.  At  the  same  time  it  should  be 
remembered  that  some  of  Keats's  most  Huntian- 
seeming  rimes  and  phrases  contain  really  an  echo  of 
the  older  masters.^  That  William  Browne  was  his 
earhest  model  in  the  handling  of  the  metre  will,  I  think, 
be  apparent  to  any  reader  who  will  put  the  passage  from 
Britannia^ s  Pastorals  above  quoted  (p.  98),  with  its 
easily  flowing  couplets  varied  at  intervals  by  whole 
clusters  or  bunches  of  double  endings,  alongside  of  the 
following  from  Keats's  first  Epistle: — 

Too  partial  friend !    fain  would  I  follow  thee 
Past  each  horizon  of  fine  poesy; 

^Here,  for  instance,  are  verses  of  Keats  that  have  often  been  charged 
with  Coclmeyism  and  Huntism: — 

And  revelled  in  a  chat  that  ceased  not 
When  at  nightfall  among  our  books  we  got. 

The  silence  when  some  rimes  are  coming  out, 
And  when  they're  come,  the  very  pleasant  rout. 

Well,  but  had  not  Drayton  written  in  his  Epistle  to  Henry  Reynolds? — 

My  dearly  loved  friend  how  oft  have  we 
In  winter  evenings  (meaning  to  be  free) 
To  some  well-chosen  place  used  to  retire, 
And  there  with  moderate  meat,  and  wine,  and  fire, 
Have  past  the  hour  contentedly  with  chat, 
Now  talked  of  this  and  then  discoursed  of  that, 
Spoke  our  own  verses  'twixt  ourselves,  if  not 
Other  men's  lines,  which  we  by  chance  had  got. 

And  Milton  in  the  Vacation  Exercise? — 

I  have  some  lively  thoughts  that  rove  about, 
And  loudly  knock  to  have  their  passage  out. 


110  KEATS  TO  MATHEW:  BROWNE^S  INFLUENCE 

Fain  would  I  echo  back  each  pleasant  note 

As  o'er  Sicilian  seas,  clear  anthems  float 

'Mong  the  light  skimming  gondolas  far  parted. 

Just  when  the  sun  his  farewell  beam  has  darted: 

But  'tis  impossible;  far  different  cares 

Beckon  me  sternly  from  soft '  Lydian  airs,' 

And  hold  my  faculties  so  long  in  thrall,  J 

That  I  am  oft  in  doubt  whether  at  all 

I  shall  again  see  Phoebus  in  the  morning: 

Or  flush'd  Aurora  in  the  roseate  dawning ! 

Or  a  white  Naiad  in  a  rippling  stream; 

Or  a  rapt  seraph  in  a  moonlight  beam; 

Or  again  witness  what  with  thee  I've  seen. 

The  dew  by  fairy  feet  swept  from  the  green. 

After  a  night  of  some  quaint  jubilee 

Which  every  elf  and  fay  had  come  to  see: 

When  bright  processions  took  their  airy  march 

Beneath  the  curved  moon's  triumphal  arch. 

But  might  I  now  each  passing  moment  give 

To  the  coy  muse,  with  me  she  would  not  live 

In  this  dark  city,  nor  would  condescend 

'Mid  contradictions  her  delights  to  lend. 

Should  e'er  the  fine-ey'd  maid  to  me  be  kind. 

Ah !  surely  it  must  be  whene'er  I  find 

Some  flowery  spot,  sequester'd,  wild,  romantic. 

That  often  must  have  seen  a  poet  frantic; 

Where  oaks,  that  erst  the  Druid  knew,  are  growing. 

And  flowers,  the  glory  of  one  day,  are  blowing; 

Where  the  dark-leav'd  laburnum's  drooping  clusters 

Reflect  athwart  the  stream  their  yellow  lustres. 

And  intertwin'd  the  cassia's  arms  unite. 

With  its  own  drooping  buds,  but  very  white. 

This  is  artless  enough  as  writings  but  obviously  sincere, 
and  interesting  as  showing  how  early  and  instinctively 
both  Greek  and  mediaeval  mythology  had  become  to 
Keats  symbols  and  incarnations,  as  living  as  in  the 
days  of  their  first  creation,  of  the  charm  and  power  of 
nature.  The  piece  ends  with  a  queer  Ovidian  fancy 
about  his  friend,  to  the  effect  that  he,  Mathew,  had  once 
been  a  'flowret  blooming  wild'  beside  the  springs  of 
poetry,  and  that  Diana  had  plucked  him  and  thrown 
him  into  the  stream  as  an  offering  to  her  brother  Apollo, 
who  had  turned  him  into  a  goldfinch,  from  which  he 


CALIDORE:    INFLUENCE  OF  HUNT      111 

was  metamorphosed  into  a  black-eyed  swan  fed  by- 
Naiads. 

The  next  experiments  in  this  measure,  the  fragment 
of  Calidore  with  its  Induction,  date  from  a  few  months 
later,  after  the  publication  of  Rimini^  and  express  the 
longing  of  the  young  aspirant  to  follow  the  example  of 
Hunt,  the  loved  Libertas,  and  tell,  he  too,  a  tale  of 
chivalry.  But  the  longing  is  seconded  by  scarce  a  touch 
of  inspiration.  The  Gothic  and  nature  descriptions  are 
quite  cheap  and  external,  the  figures  of  knights  and 
ladies  quite  conventional,  the  whole  thing  a  matter  of 
plumes  and  palfreys  and  lances,  shallow  graces  of  cos- 
tume and  sentiment,  much  more  recalling  Stothard's 
sugared  illustrations  to  Spenser  than  the  spirit  of 
Spenser  himself,  whose  patronage  Keats  timorously 
invokes.  He  at  the  same  time  entreats  Hunt  to  inter- 
cede with  Spenser  on  his  behalf:  and  in  the  result  it 
seems  as  though  Hunt  had  stepped  bodily  in  between 
them.  In  the  handling  of  the  metre,  indeed,  there  is 
nothing  of  Hunt's  diluted  Drydenism :  there  is  the  same 
direct  though  timid  following  of  Elizabethan  precedents 
as  before,  varied  by  an  occasional  echo  of  Lyddas  in 
the  use  of  the  short  six-syllable  line: — 

Anon  he  leaps  along  the  oaken  floors 
Of  halls  and  corridors. 

But  in  the  style  and  sentiment  we  trace  Leigh  Hunt,  or 
those  elements  in  Keats  which  were  naturally  akin  to 
him,  at  every  turn.  We  read,  for  instance,  of  trees 
that  lean 

So  elegantly  o*er  the  water's  brim 

And  show  their  blossoms  trim: 
and  of 

The  lamps  that  from  the  high-roof  d  hall  were  pendent 
And  gave  the  steel  a  shining  quite  transcendent. 

A  few  months  later,  on  his  August  and  September 
holiday  at  Margate,  Keats  resumes  the  measure  again, 
in  two  famihar  epistles,  one  to  his  brother  George,  the 
other  to  Cowden  Clarke.    To  bis  brother  he  expresses 


112  EPISTLE  TO  GEORGE  KEATS 

frankly,  and  in  places  felicitously,  the  moods  and  aspira- 
tions of  a  youth  passionately  and  justly  conscious  of  the 
working  of  the  poetic  impulse  in  him,  but  not  less  justly 
dissatisfied  with  the  present  fruits  of  such  impulse,  and 
wondering  whether  any  worth  gathering  will  ever  come 
to  ripeness.  He  tells  us  of  hours  when  all  in  vain  he 
gazes  at  the  play  of  sheet  lightning  or  pries  among  the 
stars  Ho  strive  to  think  divinely,'  and  of  other  hours 
when  the  doors  of  the  clouds  break  open  and  show  him 
visions  of  the  pawing  of  white  horses,  the  flashing  of 
festal  wine  cups  in  halls  of  gold,  and  supernatural  colours 
of  dimly  seen  flowers.  In  such  moods,  he  asks  con- 
cerning an  imagined  poet : — 

Should  he  upon  an  evening  ramble  fare 

With  forehead  to  the  soothing  breezes  bare, 

Would  he  naught  see  but  the  dark  silent  blue 

With  all  its  diamonds  trembling  through  and  through  ? 

Or  the  coy  moon,  when  in  the  waviness 

Of  whitest  clouds  she  does  her  beauty  dress. 

And  staidly  paces  higher  up,  and  higher. 

Like  a  sweet  nun  in  holy-day  attire  ? 

Ah,  yes !  much  more  would  start  into  his  sight — 

The  revelries,  and  mysteries  of  night: 

And  should  I  ever  see  them,  I  will  tell  you 

Such  tales  as  needs  must  with  amazement  spell  you. 

But  richer  even  than  these  privileges  of  the  poet  in  his 
illuminated  moments  is  the  reward  which  he  may  look 
for  from  posterity.  In  a  long  passage,  deeply  pathetic 
considering  the  after-event,  Keats  imagines  exultingly 
what  must  be  a  poet's  deathbed  feelings  when  he  fore- 
sees how  his  name  and  work  will  be  cherished  in  after 
times  by  men  and  women  of  all  sorts  and  conditions — 
warrior,  statesman,  and  philosopher,  village  May-queen 
and  nursing  mother  (the  best  and  most  of  the  verses  are 
those  which  picture  the  May-queen  taking  his  book  from 
her  bosom  to  read  to  a  thrilled  circle  on  the  village 
green).  He  might  be  happier,  he  admits,  could  he 
stifle  all  these  ambitions.  Yet  there  are  moments  when 
he  already  tastes  the  true  delights  of  poetry;  and  at 
any  rate  he  can  take  pleasure  in  the  thought  that  his 


EPISTLE  TO  COWDEN  CLARKE  113 

brother  will  like  what  he  writes;  and  so  he  is  content  to 
close  with  an  attempt  at  a  quiet  description  of  the 
Thanet  scenery  and  surroundings  whence  he  writes. 

In  addressing  Cowden  Clarke  Keats  begins  with  an 
odd  image,  Hkening  the  way  in  which  poetic  inspiration 
eludes  him  to  the  sKpping  away  of  drops  of  water  which  a 
swan  vainly  tries  to  collect  in  the  hollows  of  his  plumage. 
He  would  have  written  sooner,  he  tells  his  correspondent, 
but  had  nothing  worthy  to  submit  to  one  so  familiar 
with  the  whole  range  of  poetry  and  recently,  moreover, 
privileged  to  walk  and  talk  with  Leigh  Hunt, — 

One,  who,  of  late,  had  ta'en  sweet  forest  walks 
With  him  who  elegantly  chats,  and  talks — 
The  wrong'd  Libertas, — who  has  told  you  stories 
Of  laurel  chaplets,  and  Apollo's  glories; 
Of  troops  chivalrous  prancing  through  a  city. 
And  tearful  ladies  made  for  love,  and  pity. 

(The  allusion  in  the  last  three  lines  is  of  course  to  The 
Feast  of  the  Poets  and  Rimini.  The  passage  seems  to 
make  it  certain  that  whatever  intercourse  Keats  him- 
self may  up  to  this  time  have  had  with  Hunt  was  slight.) 
Even  now,  he  goes  on,  he  would  not  show  Clarke  his 
verses  but  that  he  takes  courage  from  their  old  friend- 
ship and  from  his  sense  of  owing  to  it  all  he  knows  of 
poetry.  Recurring  to  the  pleasantness  of  his  present 
smroundings,  he  says  that  they  have  inspired  him  to 
attempt  the  verses  he  is  now  writing  for  his  friend, 
which  would  have  been  better  only  that  they  have  been 
too  long  parted.  Then  follow  the  lines  quoted  farther 
back  (p.  37)  in  affectionate  remembrance  of  old  Enfield 
and  Edmonton  days. 

In  these  early  attempts  Keats  again  ventures  some 
way,  but  not  yet  far,  in  the  direction  of  breaking  the 
fetters  of  the  regular  couplet.  He  runs  his  sentences 
freely  enough  through  a  succession  of  Unes,  but  nine 
times  out  of  ten  with  some  kind  of  pause  as  well  as 
emphasis  on  the  rime-word.  He  deals  freely  in  double 
endings,  and  occasionally,  but  not  often  (oftenest  in 
the  epistle  to  George)  breaks  the  run  of  a  Une  with  a  full 


114   SLEEP  AND  POETRY  AND  7  STOOD  TIP-TOE' 

stop  in  or  near  the  middle.  He  is  in  like  manner  timid 
and  sparing  as  yet  in  the  use,  to  which  a  little  later  he 
was  to  give  rein  so  fully,  of  EHzabethan  word-forais,  or 
forms  modelled  for  himself  on  EHzabethan  usage. 

Somewhat  more  free  and  adventurous  alike  in  metre 
and  in  diction  are  the  two  poems.  Sleep  and  Poetry  and 
*/  stood  tip-toe/  which  Keats  wrote  after  he  came  back  to 
London  in  the  autimm.  These  are  the  things  which, 
together  with  two  or  three  of  the  sonnets,  give  its  real 
distinction  and  high  promise  to  the  volume.  Both  in 
substance  and  intention  they  are  preludes  merely,  but 
preludes  of  genius,  and,  although  marked  by  many 
immaturities,  as  interesting  and  attractive  perhaps  as 
anything  which  has  ever  been  written  by  a  poet  of  the 
same  age  about  his  art  and  his  aspirations.  In  them 
the  ardent  novice  communes  intently  with  himself  on 
his  own  hopes  and  ambitions.  Possessed  by  the  thrilling 
sense  that  everything  in  earth  and  air  is  full,  as  it  were, 
of  poetry  in  solution,  he  has  as  yet  no  clearness  as  to 
the  forms  and  modes  in  which  these  suspended  elements 
will  crystallise  for  him.  In  Sleep  and  Poetry  he  tries  to 
get  into  shape  his  conceptions  of  the  end  and  aim  of 
poetical  endeavour,  conjures  up  the  difficulties  of  his 
task,  counts  over  the  new  achievement  and  growing 
promise  of  the  time  in  which  he  lives,  and  gives  thanks 
for  the  encouragement  by  which  he  has  been  personally 
sustained.  In  ^I  stood  tip-toe^  he  runs  over  the  stock  of 
nature-images  which  are  his  own  private  and  peculiar 
delight,  traces  in  various  phases  and  aspects  of  nature  a 
symbolic  affinity,  or  spiritual  identity,  with  various  forms 
and  kinds  of  poetry;  tells  how  such  a  strain  of  verse 
will  call  up  such  and  such  a  range  of  nature-images,  and 
conversely  how  this  or  that  group  of  outdoor  delights 
will  inspire  this  or  that  mood  of  poetic  invention;  and 
finally  goes  on  to  speculate  on  the  moods  which  first 
inspired  some  of  the  Grecian  tales  he  loves  best,  and 
above  all  the  tale  of  Endymion  and  Cynthia,  the  bene- 
ficent wonders  of  whose  bridal  night  he  hopes  himself 
one  day  to  reteU. 


ANALYSIS  OF  SLEEP  AND  POETRY     115 

Sleep  and  Poetry  is  printed  at  the  end  of  the  volume, 
'I  stood  tip-toe^  at  the  beginning.  It  is  hard  to  tell  which 
of  the  two  pieces  was  written  first. ^  Sleep  and  Poetry 
is  the  longer  and  more  important,  and  has  more  the 
air  of  having  been  composed,  so  to  speak,  all  of  a  piece. 
We  know  that  '/  stood  tip-toe^  was  not  finished  until  the 
end  of  December  1816.  Sleep  and  Poetry  cannot  well 
have  been  written  later,  seeing  that  the  book  was 
published  in  the  first  days  of  the  following  March,  and 
must  therefore  have  gone  to  press  early  in  the  new  year. 
What  seems  likehest  is  that  Sleep  and  Poetry  was  written 
without  break  during  the  first  freshness  of  Keats's 
autumn  intimacy  at  the  Hampstead  cottage;  while  ^I 
stood  tip-toe^  may  have  been  begun  in  the  summer  and 
resumed  at  intervals  until  the  year's  end.  I  shall  take 
Sleep  and  Poetry  first  and  let '/  stood  tip-toe^  come  after, 
as  being  the  direct  and  express  prelude  to  the  great 
experiment,  Endymion,  which  was  to  follow. 

The  scheme  of  Sleep  and  Poetry  is  to  some  extent  that 
of  The  Floure  and  the  Lefe,  the  pseudo-Chaucerian  poem 
which,  as  we  have  seen,  had  so  strongly  caught  Keats's 
fancy.  Keats  takes  for  his  motto  fines  from  that  poem 
telling  of  a  night  wakeful  but  none  the  less  cheerful,  and 
avers  that  his  own  poem  was  the  result  of  just  such 
another  night.  An  opening  invocation  sets  the  blessings 
of  sleep  above  a  number  of  other  delightful  things  which 
it  gives  him  joy  to  think  of,  and  recounts  the  activities 
of  Sleep  personified, — ^Silent  entangler  of  a  beauty's 
tresses,'  etc., — in  lines  charming  and  essentially  char- 
acteristic, for  it  is  the  way  of  his  imagination  to  be 
continually  discovering  active  and  dynamic  quaHties  in 
things  and  to  let  their  passive  and  inert  properties  be. 
But  far  higher  and  more  precious  than  the  blessings  of 
sleep  are  those  of  something  else  which  he  will  not 
name: — 

What  is  it  ?    And  to  what  shall  I  compare  it  ? 
It  has  a  glory,  and  nought  else  can  share  it: 

*  It  is  to  be  remembered  that  in  his  famous  volume  of  1820  Keats  prints 
first  the  poem  he  had  last  written,  Lamia. 


116  DOUBLE  INVOCATION 

The  thought  thereof  is  awful,  sweet,  and  holy. 

Chasing  away  all  worldiness  and  folly; 

Coming  sometimes  like  fearful  claps  of  thunder. 

Or  the  low  rumblings  earth's  regions  under; 

And  sometimes  like  a  gentle  whispering 

Of  all  the  secrets  of  some  wond'rous  thing 

That  breathes  about  us  in  the  vacant  air; 

So  that  we  look  around  with  prying  stare. 

Perhaps  to  see  shapes  of  light,  aerial  limning. 

And  catch  soft  floatings  from  a  faint-heard  hymning; 

To  see  the  laurel  wreath,  on  high  suspended. 

That  is  to  crown  our  name  when  Hfe  is  ended. 

Sometimes  it  gives  a  glory  to  the  voice. 

And  from  the  heart  up-springs,  rejoice !  rejoice  I 

Sounds  which  will  reach  the  Framer  of  all  things. 

And  die  away  in  ardent  mutterings. 

Every  enlightened  spirit  will  guess,  he  implies,  that  this 
thing  is  poetry,  and  to  Poetry  personified  he  addresses 
his  next  invocation,  declaring  that  if  he  can  endure  the 
overwhelming  favour  of  her  acceptance  he  will  be  ad- 
mitted to  Hhe  fair  visions  of  all  places'  and  will  learn 
to  reveal  in  verse  the  hidden  beauty  and  meanings  of 
things,  in  an  ascending  scale  from  the  playing  of  nymphs 
in  woods  and  fountains  to  'the  events  of  this  wide 
world,'  which  it  will  be  given  him  to  seize  'Hke  a  strong 
giant.' 

At  this  point  a  warning  voice  within  him  reminds 
him  sadly  of  the  shortness  and  fragility  of  life,  to 
which  an  answering  inward  voice  of  gay  courage  and 
hope  replies.  Keats  could  only  think  in  images,  and 
almost  invariably  in  images  of  life  and  action:  those 
here  conveying  the  warning  and  its  reply  are  alike 
felicitous : — 

Stop  and  consider  I  life  is  but  a  day; 
A  fragile  dew-drop  on  its  perilous  way 
From  a  tree's  summit;  a  poor  Indian's  sleep 
While  his  boat  hastens  to  the  monstrous  steep 
Of  Montmorenci.     Why  so  sad  a  moan  ? 
Life  is  the  rose's  hope  while  yet  unblown; 
The  reading  of  an  ever-changing  tale; 
The  light  uplifting  of  a  maiden's  veil; 


VISION   OF  THE   CHARIOTEER  117 

A  pigeon  tumbling  in  clear  summer  air; 

A  laughing  school-boy,  without  grief  or  care, 

Riding  the  springy  branches  of  an  elm. 

Then  follows  a  cry  for  length  enough  of  years  (he  will 
be  content  with  ten)  to  carry  out  the  poetic  schemes 
which  float  before  his  mind;  and  here  he  returns  to  his 
ascending  scale  of  poetic  ambitions  and  sets  it  forth 
and  amplifies  it  with  a  new  richness  of  figurative  imager}^ 
First  the  realms  of  Pan  and  Flora,  the  pleasures  of 
nature  and  the  country  and  the  enticements  of  toying 
nymphs  (perhaps  with  a  Virgilian  touch  in  his  memory 
from  schoolboy  days — Panaque  Silvanumque  senem  nym- 
phdsque  sorores — certainly  with  visions  from  Poussin's 
Bacchanals  in  his  mind's  eye) :  then,  the  ascent  to  loftier 
regions  where  the  imagination  has  to  grapple  with  the 
deeper  mysteries  of  life  and  experiences  of  the  soul.  Here 
again  he  can  only  shadow  forth  his  ideas  by  evoking 
shapes  and  actions  of  visible  beings  to  stand  for  and  re- 
present them  symbolically.  He  sees  a  charioteer  guiding 
his  horses  among  the  clouds,  looking  out  the  while  'with 
glorious  fear,'  then  swooping  downward  to  alight  on  a 
grassy  hillside;  then  talking  with  strange  gestures  to 
the  trees  and  mountains,  then  gazing  and  listening, 
'awfully  intent,'  and  writing  something  on  his  tablets 
while  a  procession  of  various  human  shapes,  'shapes  of 
delight,  of  mystery  and  fear,'  sweeps  on  before  his  view, 
as  if  in  pursuit  of  some  ever-fleeting  music,  in  the  shadow 
cast  by  a  grove  of  oaks.  The  dozen  lines  calHng  up  to 
the  mind's  eye  the  multitude  and  variety  of  figures  in 
this  procession — 

Yes,  thousands  in  a  thousand  different  ways 
Flit  onward — 

contain  less  suggestion  than  we  should  have  expected 
from  what  has  gone  before,  of  the  events  and  tragedies 
of  the  world,  'the  agonies,  the  strife  of  human  hearts,' — 
and  close  with  the  vision  of 

a  lovely  wreath  of  girls 
Dancing  their  sleek  hair  into  tangled  curls. 


118    BATTLE-CRY  OF  THE  NEW  POETRY 

as  if  images  of  pure  pagan  joy  and  beauty  would  keep 
forcing  themselves  on  the  young  aspirant's  mind  in 
spite  of  his  resolve  to  train  himself  for  the  grapple  with 
sterner  themes. 

This  vision  of  the  charioteer  and  his  team  remained  in 
Keats's  mind  as  a  symbol  for  the  imagination  and  its 
energies.  For  the  moment,  so  his  poem  goes  on,  the 
vision  vanishes,  and  the  sense  of  every-day  realities 
seems  like  a  muddy  stream  bearing  his  soul  into  nothing- 
ness. But  he  clings  to  the  memory  of  that  chariot 
and  its  journey;  and  thereupon  turns  to  consider  the 
history  of  English  poetry  and  the  dearth  of  imagina- 
tion from  which  it  had  suffered  for  so  many  years. 
Here  comes  the  famous  outbreak,  first  of  indignant 
and  then  of  congratulatory  criticism,  which  was  the 
most  expHcit  battle-cry  of  the  romantic  revolution  in 
poetry  since  the  publication  of  Wordsworth's  preface 
to  the  second  edition  of  Lyrical  Ballads  seventeen  years 
earlier: — 

Is  there  so  small  a  range 
In  the  present  strength  of  manhood,  that  the  high 
Imagination  cannot  freely  fly 
As  she  was  wont  of  old  ?  prepare  her  steeds, 
Paw  up  against  the  light,  and  do  strange  deeds 
Upon  the  clouds  ?    Has  she  not  shown  us  all  ? 
From  the  clear  space  of  ether,  to  the  small 
Breath  of  new  buds  unfolding  ?     From  the  meaning 
Of  Jove's  large  eye-brow,  to  thei  tender  greening 
Of  April  meadows  ?    Here  her  altar  shone. 
E'en  in  this  isle;  and  who  could  paragon 
The  fervid  choir  that  lifted  up  a  noise 
Of  harmony,  to  where  it  aye  will  poise 
Its  mighty  self  of  convoluting  sound. 
Huge  as  a  planet,  and  like  that  roll  round. 
Eternally  around  a  dizzy  void  ? 
Ay,  in  those  days  the  Muses  were  nigh  cloy'd 
With  honors;  nor  had  any  other  care 
Than  to  sing  out  and  sooth  their  wavy  hair. 

Could  all  this  be  forgotten  ?    Yes,  a  schism 
Nurtured  by  foppery  and  barbarism. 
Made  great  Apollo  blush  for  this  his  land. 
Men  were  thought  wise  who  could  not  understand 


ITS  STRENGTH  AND  WEAKNESS        119 

His  glories:  with  a  puling  infant's  force 
They  sway'd  about  upon  a  rocking  horse 
And  thought  it  Pegasus.     Ah  dismal  souFd ! 
The  winds  of  heaven  blew,  the  ocean  roU'd 
Its  gathering  waves — ^ye  felt  it  not.    The  blue 
Bared  its  eternal  bosom/  and  the  dew 
Of  summer  nights  collected  still  to  make 
The  morning  precious:  beauty  was  awake ! 
Why  were  ye  not  awake  ?    But  ye  were  dead 
To  things  ye  knew  not  of, — ^were  closely  wed 
To  musty  laws  lined  out  with  wretched  rule 
And  compass  vile:  so  that  ye  thought  a  school 
Of  dolts  to  smooth,  inlay,  and  clip,  and  fit. 
Till,  like  the  certain  wands  of  Jacob's  wit. 
Their  verses  tallied.    Easy  was  the  task: 
A  thousand  handicraftsmen  wore  the  mask 
Of  Poesy.     Ill-fated,  impious  race ! 
That  blasphemed  the  bright  Lyrist  to  his  face. 
And  did  not  know  it, — ^no,  they  went  about. 
Holding  a  poor,  decrepid  standard  out 
Mark'd  with  most  flimsy  mottos,  and  in  large 
The  name  of  one  Boileau ! 


The  two  great  elder  captains  of  poetic  revolution, 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  have  expounded  their  cause, 
in  prose,  with  full  maturity  of  thought  and  language: 
Wordsworth  in  the  austere  contentions  of  his  famous 
prefaces  to  his  second  edition  (1800),  Coleridge  in  the 
luminous  retrospect  of  the  Biographia  Literaria  (1816). 
In  the  interval  a  cloud  of  critics,  including  men  of  such 
gifts  as  Lamb,  Hazlitt,  and  Leigh  Hunt,  were  in  their 
several  ways  champions  of  the  same  cause.  But  none 
of  these  has  left  any  enunciation  of  theory  having  power 
to  thrill  the  ear  and  haunt  the  memory  like  the  rimes 
of  this  young  untrained  recruit,  John  Keats.  It  is  easy, 
indeed,  to  pick  his  verses  to  shreds,  if  we  choose  to  fix 
a  prosaic  and  rational  attention  on  their  faults.  What 
is  it,  for  instance,  that  imagination  is  asked  to  do? 
Fly,  or  drive?  Is  it  she,  or  her  steeds,  that  are  to  paw 
up  against  the  Hght?    And  why  paw?    Deeds  to  be 

^  So  Wordsworth  in  his  famous  sonnet: — 

This  sea  that  bares  its  bosom  to  the  moon. 


120   CHALLENGE  AND  CONGRATULATION 

done  upon  clouds  by  pawing  can  hardly  be  other  than 
strange.  What  sort  of  a  verb  is  '  I  green,  thou  greenest  ? ' 
Why  should  the  hair  of  the  Muses  require  'soothing'? 
— if  it  were  their  tempers  it  would  be  more  intelligible. 
And  surely  *  foppery'  belongs  to  civilisation  and  not  to 
'barbarism':  and  a  standard-bearer  may  be  decrepit 
but  not  a  standard,  and  a  standard  flimsy  but  not  a 
motto.  And  so  on  without  end,  if  we  choose  to  let  the 
mind  assume  that  attitude  and  to  resent  the  contemp- 
tuous treatment  of  a  very  finished  artist  and  craftsman 
by  one  as  yet  obviously  raw  and  imperfect.  Byron,  in  his 
controversy  with  Bowles  a  year  or  two  later,  adopted 
this  mode  of  attack  effectively  enough;  his  spleen 
against  a  contemporary  finding  as  usual  its  most  con- 
venient weapon  in  an  enthusiasm,  partly  real  and  partly 
affected,  for  the  genius  and  the  methods  of  Pope.  But 
controversy  apart,  if  we  have  in  us  a  touch  of  instinct 
for  the  poetry  of  imagination  and  beauty,  as  distinct 
from  that  of  taste  and  reason  and  'correctness', — how- 
ever clearly  we  may  see  the  weak  points  of  a  passage 
like  this,  yet  we  cannot  but  feel  that  Keats  touches 
truly  the  root  of  the  matter:  we  cannot  but  admire  the 
ring  and  power  of  his  appeal  to  the  elements,  his  fine 
spontaneous  and  effective  turns  of  rhetoric,  and  the 
elastic  life  and  variety  of  his  verse. 

So  much  for  the  indignant  part  of  the  passage.  The 
congratulatory  part  repeats  with  different  imagery  the 
sense  of  the  sonnet  to  Hay  don  beginning  'Great  spirits 
now  on  earth  are  sojourning,'  and  declares  that  fine 
sounds  are  once  more  floating  wild  about  the  earth, 
wherefore  the  Muses  are  now  glad  and  happy.  But  the 
congratulations,  it  next  occurs  to  the  young  poet,  need 
to  be  quahfied.  To  some  of  the  recent  achievements  of 
poetry  he  demurs,  declaring  that  their  themes  of  song 
are  'ugly  clubs'  and  the  poets  who  fling  them  Poly- 
phemuses  'disturbing  the  grand  sea  of  song'  (Keats  is 
here  remembering  the  huge  club  which  Ulysses  and  his 
companions,  in  the  Homeric  story,  find  in  the  cave  of 
Polyphemus,  and  confusing  it  with  the  rocks  which  the 


ENCOURAGEMENTS  ACKNOWLEDGED   121 

blinded  giant  later  tears  up  and  hurls  after  them  into  the 
sea).^  The  obvious  supposition  is  that  Keats  is  here 
referring  to  Byron's  Eastern  tales,  with  their  clamour  and 
heat  and  violence  of  melodramatic  action  and  pas- 
sion. Leigh  Hunt,  indeed,  who  ought  to  have  known, 
asserts  in  his  review  of  the  volimie  that  they  are  aimed 
against  Hhe  morbidity  which  taints  some  of  the  pro- 
ductions of  the  poets  of  the  Lake  School.'  I  suspect 
that  Hunt  is  here  attributing  to  Keats  some  of  his  own 
poetical  aversions.  What  productions  can  he  mean? 
Southey's  Curse  of  Kehama  ?  Coleridge's  Ancient  Mari- 
ner or  Christahel?  Wordsworth's  relatively  few  poems, 
or  episodes,  of  tragic  life — as  the  Mad  Mother,  Ruth, 
Margaret?  For  certainly  the  strained  simplicities  and 
trivialities  of  some  of  his  country  ballads,  which  were 
what  Leigh  Hunt  and  his  friends  most  disliked  in  Words- 
worth's work,  could  never  be  called  thunders. 

But  these  jarring  things,  Keats  goes  on,  shall  not 
disturb  him.  He  will  beHeve  in  and  seek  to  enter  upon 
the  kingdom  of  poetry  where  all  shall  be  gentle  and 
soothing  like  a  lawn  beneath  a  myrtle  tree, 

And  they  shall  be  accounted  poet-kings 

Who  simply  sing  the  most  heart-easing  things. 

Then  a  momentary  terror  of  his  own  presumption  seizes 
him;  but  he  puts  it  away,  defies  despondency,  and 
declares  that  for  all  his  youth  and  lack  of  learning  and 
wisdom,  he  has  a  vast  idea  before  him,  and  a  clear  con- 
ception of  the  end  and  aim  of  poetry.  Dare  the  utmost 
he  will — and  then  once  more  the  sense  of  the  greatness 
of  the  task  comes  over  him,  and  he  falls  back  for  support 
on  thoughts  of  recent  friendship  and  encouragement. 
A  score  of  lines  follow,  recalling  happy  talks  at  Hunt's 
over  books  and  prints:  the  memory  of  these  calls 
up  by  association  a  string  of  the  delights  (luxuries' 
as  in  Huntian  phrase  he  calls  them)  of  nature:   thence 

^  In  Lord  Houghton's  and  nearly  all  editions  of  Keats,  including,  I  am 
Borry  to  say,  my  own,  this  phrase  has  been  corrected,  quite  without  cause, 
into  the  trite  'ugly  cubs.* 


122       ANALYSIS  OF  'I  STOOD  TIP-TOE' 

he  recurs  to  the  pleasures  of  sleep,  or  rather  of  a  night 
when  sleep  failed  him  for  thinking  over  the  intercourse 
he  had  been  enjoying  and  the  place  where  he  now  rested 
— that  is  on  the  couch  in  Hunt's  library.  Here  follow 
the  lines  quoted  above  (p.  53)  about  the  prints  on  the 
library  walls :  and  the  piece  concludes: — 

The  very  sense  of  where  I  was  might  well 

Keep  Sleep  aloof:  but  more  than  that  there  came 

Thought  after  thought  to  nourish  up  the  flame 

Within  my  breast;  so  that  the  morning  light 

Surprised  me  even  from  a  sleepless  night; 

And  up  I  rose  refreshed,  and  glad,  and  gay. 

Resolving  to  begin  that  very  day 

These  lines;  and  howsoever  they  be  done, 

I  leave  them  as  a  father  does  his  son. 

The  best  reason  for  thinking  that  the  poem  '/  stood 
tip-toe/  though  probably  finished  quite  as  late  as  Sleep 
and  Poetry,  was  begun  earlier,  is  that  in  it  Keats  again 
follows  the  practice  which  he  had  attempted  in  Calidore 
and  its  Induction  but  gave  up  in  Sleep  and  Poetry ,  namely 
that  of  occasionally  introducing  a  lyrical  effect  with  a 
six-syllable  line,  in  the  manner  used  by  Spenser  in  the 
Epithalamion  and  Milton  in  Lyddas, — 

Open  afresh  your  round  of  starry  folds. 
Ye  ardent  marigolds ! 

No  conclusion  as  to  the  date  when  the  piece  was  begun 
can  be  drawn  from  the  scene  of  summer  freshness  with 
which  it  opens,  or  from  Leigh  Hunt's  statement  that  this 
description  was  suggested  by  a  summer's  day  when  he 
stood  at  a  certain  spot  on  Hampstead  Heath.  This  may 
be  quite  true,  but  in  the  mind  of  a  poet  such  scenes 
ripen  by  recollection,  and  Keats  may  at  any  after  day 
have  evoked  it  for  his  purpose,  which  was  to  bring  his 
imagination  to  the  right  taking-off  place — to  plant  it,  so 
to  speak,  on  the  right  spring-board — ^from  which  to 
start  on  its  flight  through  a  whole  succession  of  other 
and  kindred  images  of  natural  beauty.  Some  of  the 
series  of  evocations  that  follow  are  already  almost  in 
the    happiest    vein    of    Keats's    lighter    nature-poetry, 


INTENDED   INDUCTION  TO  ENDYMION    123 

especially  the  four  lines  about  the  sweet  peas  on 
tip-toe  for  a  flight,  and  the  long  passage  recalling 
his  boyish  deHghts  by  the  Edmonton  brookside  and 
telling  (in  lines  which  Tennyson  has  remembered  in  his 
idyll  of  Enid)  how  the  minnows  would  scatter  beneath 
the  shadow  of  a  lifted  hand  and  come  together  again. 
When  in  the  course  of  his  recapitulation  there  comes  to 
him  the  image  of  the  moon  appearing  from  behind  a 
cloud,  he  breaks  off  to  apostrophise  that  goddess  of  his 
imaginative  idolatry,  that  source  at  once  and  symbol, 
for  such  to  his  instinct  she  truly  was,  of  poetic  inspira- 
tion. But  for  the  moment  he  does  not  pursue  the  theme: 
he  pauses  to  trace  the  affinities  between  several  kinds  of 
nature-delight   and  corresponding  moods  of  poetry,  — 

In  the  calm  grandeur  of  a  sober  line. 

We  see  the  waving  of  the  mountain  pine;         ' 

And  when  a  tale  is  beautifully  staid. 

We  feel  the  safety  of  a  hawthorn  glade, — 

and  so  forth.  And  then,  having  in  his  mind^s  eye,  as 
I  should  guess,  some  of  the  mythological  prints  from 
Hunt's  portfolios,  he  asks  what  moods  or  phases  of 
nature  first  inspired  the  poets  of  old  with  the  fables 
of  Cupid  and  Psyche  and  of  Pan  and  Syrinx,  of  Narcissus 
and  Echo,  and  most  beautiful  of  all,  that  of  Cynthia  and 
Endymion, — and  for  the  remaining  fifty  Hues  of  the 
poem  moonlight  and  the  Endymion  story  take  full 
possession.  The  lines  imagining  the  occasion  of  the 
myth's  invention  are  lovely: — 

He  was  a  Poet,  sure  a  lover  too, 
Who  stood  on  Latmus'  top,  what  time  there  blew 
Soft  breezes  from  the  myrtle  vale  below; 
And  brought  in  faintness  solemn,  sweet,  and  slow 
A  hymn  from  Dian's  temple;  while  upswelling. 
The  incense  went  to  her  own  starry  dwelling. 
But  though  her  face  was  clear  as  infant's  eyes. 
Though  she  stood  smiling  o'er  the  sacrifice. 
The  Poet  wept  at  her  so  piteous  fate, 
Wept  that  such  beauty  should  be  desolate: 
So  in  fine  wrath  some  golden  sounds  he  won. 
And  gave  meek  Cynthia  her  Endymion. 


124  RELATION  TO  ELIZABETHANS 

Then,  treating  the  bridal  night  for  the  moment  not  as  a 
myth  but  as  a  thing  that  actually  happened,  he  recounts, 
in  a  strain  of  purely  human  tenderness  which  owes  some- 
thing to  his  hospital  experience  and  which  he  was  hardly 
afterwards  to  surpass,  the  sweet  and  beneficent  influences 
diffused  on  that  night  about  the  world: — 

The  breezes  were  ethereal  and  pure. 
And  crept  through  half-closed  lattices  to  cure 
The  languid  sick;  it  cool'd  their  feverM  sleep, 
And  soothed  them  into  slumbers  full  and  deep. 
Soon  they  awoke  clear  eyed,  nor  burnt  with  thirsting. 
Nor  with  hot  fingers,  nor  with  temples  bursting: 
And  springing  up,  they  met  the  wondering  sight 
Of  their  dear  friends,  nigh  foolish  with  delight; 
Who  feel  their  arms  and  breasts,  and  kiss  and  stare, 
And  on  their  placid  foreheads  part  the  hair. 
Young  men  and  maidens  at  each  other  gaz'd 
With  hands  held  back,  and  motionless,  amaz'd 
To  see  the  brightness  in  each  other's  eyes. 

Then,  closing,  he  asks  himself  the  momentous  question, 
'Was  there  a  poet  born?'  which  he  intended  that  his 
next  year's  work  should  answer. 

In  neither  of  these  poems  is  the  use  of  EHzabethan 
verbal  forms,  or  the  coinage  of  similar  forms  by  analogy, 
carried  nearly  as  far  as  we  shall  find  it  carried  later  on, 
especially  in  Endymion.  The  abstract  nouns  expressing 
qualities  pleasant  to  the  senses  or  the  sensuous  imagina- 
tion, on  the  model  of  those  in  Chapman's  Hymn  to  Pan, 
increase  in  nimiber,  and  we  get  the  'quaint  mossiness 
of  aged  roots,'  the  'hurrying  freshnesses'  of  a  stream 
running  over  gravel,  the  'pure  deliciousness'  of  the 
Endymion  story,  the  'pillow  silkiness'  of  clouds,  the 
'blue  cragginess'  of  other  clouds,  and  the  'widenesses' 
of  the  ocean  of  poetry.  Once,  evidently  with  William 
Browne's  'roundly  form'  in  his  mind,  Keats  invents, 
infehcitously  enough,  an  adjective  'boundly'  for  'boun- 
den.'  In  the  matter  of  metre,  he  is  now  fairly  well  at 
_  home  in  the  free  Elizabethan  use  of  the  couplet,  letting 
his  periods  develop  themselves  unhampered,  suffering 
his  full  pauses  to  fall  at  any  point  in  the  line  where  the 


RELATION  TO  CONTEMPORARIES       125 

sense  calls  for  them,  the  rime  echo  to  come  full  and 
emphatic  or  faint  and  light  as  may  be,  and  the  pause 
following  the  rime-word  to  be  shorter  or  longer  or  almost 
non-existent  on  occasion.  If  his  ear  was  for  the  moment 
attimed  to  the  harmonies  of  any  special  master  among 
the  Elizabethans,  it  was  by  tlus  time  Fletcher  rather 
than  Browne:  at  least  in  Sleep  and  Poetry  the  double 
endings  no  longer  come  in  clusters  as  they  did  in  the 
earlier  epistle,  nor  are  the  intervening  couplets  so  nearly 
regular,  while  there  is  a  marked  preference  for  emphasis- 
ing an  adjective  by  placing  it  at  the  end  of  a  line  and 
letting  its  noun  follow  at  the  beginning  of  the  next,^ 
'the  high  |  Imagination/ — Hhe  small  |  Breath  of  new 
buds  unfolding.'  The  reader  will  best  see  my  point  if  he 
will  compare  the  movement  of  the  passages  in  Sleep  and 
Poetry  where  these  things  occur  with  the  Endymion 
passage  he  will  find  quoted  later  on  from  the  Faithful 
Shepherdess  (p.  168). 

As  to  contemporary  influences  apparent  in  Keats's 
first  volume,  enough  has  been  said  concerning  that  of 
Leigh  Hunt.  The  influence  of  an  incommensurably 
greater  poet,  of  Wordsworth,  is  also  to  be  traced  in  it. 
That  Keats  was  by  this  time  a  diligent  and  critical 
admirer  of  Wordsworth  we  know:  both  of  the  earlier 
poems  and  of  the  Excursion,  which  had  appeared  when 
his  passion  for  poetry  was  already  at  its  height  in  the 
last  year  of  his  apprenticeship  at  Edmonton.  There  is  a 
famous  passage  in  the  fourth  book  of  The  Excursion  where 
Wordsworth  treats  of  the  spirit  of  Greek  religion  and 
imagines  how  some  of  its  conceptions  first  took  shape: — 

In  that  fair  clime,  the  lonely  herdsman,  stretched 

On  the  soft  grass  through  half  a  summer's  day. 

With  music  lulled  his  indolent  repose: 

And,  in  some  fit  of  weariness,  if  he, 

When  his  own  breath  was  silent,  chanced  to  hear 

A  distant  strain,  far  sweeter  than  the  sounds 

Which  his  poor  skill  could  make,  his  fancy  fetched. 

Even  from  the  blazing  chariot  of  the  sun, 

A  beardless  Youth,  who  touched  a  golden  lute. 

And  filled  the  illumined  groves  with  ravishment. 


126  WORDSWORTH  AND  GREEK  MYTHOLOGY 

The  nightly  hunter,  lifting  a  bright  eye 
Up  towards  the  crescent  moon,  with  grateful  heart 
Called  on  the  lovely  wanderer  who  bestowed 
That  timely  light,  to  share  his  joyous  sport: 
And  hence,  a  beaming  Goddess  with  her  Nymphs, 
Across  the  lawn  and  through  the  darksome  grove. 
Not  unaccompanied  with  tuneful  notes  -^ 

By  echo  multiplied  from  rock  or  cave,  ^ 

Swept  in  the  storm  of  chase;  as  moon  and  stars 
Glance  rapidly  along  the  clouded  heaven. 
When  winds  are  blowing  strong. 

Keats,  we  know,  was  familiar  with  this  passage,  and  a 
little  later  on  we  shall  find  him  criticising  it  in  conver- 
sation with  a  friend.    Leigh  Hunt,  in  a  review  written 
at  the  time,  hints  that  it  was  in  his  mind  when  he  wrote 
the  lines  in  '/  8U)od  tip-toe,^  asking  in  what  mood  or  under 
what  impulse  a  number  of  the  Grecian  fables  were  first 
invented  and  giving  the  answers  to  his  own  questions. 
We  may  take  Hunt's  word  for  the  fact,  seeing  that  he  was 
constantly   in  Keats's   company   at   the   time.    Other 
critics  have  gone  farther  and  supposed  it  was  from 
Wordsworth  that  Keats  first  learned  truly  to  understand 
Greek  mythology.    I  do  not  at  all  think  so.    He  would 
never  have  pored  so  passionately  over  the  stories  in  the 
classical  dictionaries  as  a  schoolboy,  nor  mused  on  them 
so  intently  in  the  field  walks  of  his  apprentice  days  by 
simset  and  moonlight,  had  not  some  inborn  instinct 
made  the  world  of  ancient  fable  and  the  world  of  natural 
beauty  each  equally  living  to  his  apprehension  and  each 
equally  life-giving  to  the  other.    Wordsworth's  inter- 
pretations will  no  doubt  have  appealed  to  him  pro- 
foundly, but  not  as  something  new,  only  as  putting 
eloquently  and  justly  what  he  had  already  felt  and 
divined  by  native  instinct. 
^      Again,  it  has  been  acutely  pointed  out  by  Mr  Robert 
\     Bridges  how  some  of  the  ideas  expressed  by  Keats  in  his 
\    own  way  in  Slee'p  and  Poetry  run  parallel  with  some  of 
<y\    those  expressed  in  a  very  different  way  by  Wordsworth 
\   in  Tintern  Abbey,  a  poem  which  we  know  from  other 
1  evidence  to  have  been  certainly  much  in  Keats's  mind 


TINTERN  ABBEY  AND  THE  THREE  STAGES  127 


a  year  and  a  half  later.  Wordsworth  in  Tintern  Abbey 
defines  three  stages  of  his  own  emotional  and  imaginative 
development  in  relation  to  nature:  first  the  stage  of 
mere  boisterous  physical  and  animal  pleasure:  then  that 
of  intense  and  absorbing,  but  still  unreflecting  passion, — 

An  appetite,  a  feeling  and  a  love 
That  had  no  need  of  a  remoter  charm 
By  thought  supplied,  nor  any  interest 
Unborrowed  from  the  eye, — 

and  lastly  the  higher,  more  humanised  and  spiritualised 
passion  doubly  enriched  by  the  ever-present  haunting  of 
Hhe  still,  sad  music  of  humanity,'  and  by  the 

sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused. 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air. 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man: 
A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought. 
And  rolls  through  all  things. 

Mr  Bridges  finds  Wordsworth's  conception  of  these    \/ 
three  stages  more  or  less  accurately  paralleled  in  various  j 

passages   of   Keats's   Sleep   and   Poetry,    One   passage  ( 

which  he  quotes,  that  in  which  Keats  figures  human 
life  imder  the  string  of  joyous  images  beginning,  'A 
pigeon  tumbling  in  clear  summer  air',  seems  to  me 
irrelevant,  as  being  simply  the  answer  of  the  poet's  soul 
to  certain  melancholy  promptings  of  its  own.  On  the 
other  hand  there  certainly  is  something  that  reminds 
us  of  Wordsworth's  three  stages  in  Keats's  repeated 
indication  of  the  ascending  scale  of  theme  and  tempe 
along  which  he  hopes  to  work.  And  his  long  figurative 
passage  beginning — 

And  can  I  ever  bid  these  joys  farewell  ? 
Yes,  I  must  pass  them  for  a  nobler  life — 

may  fairly,  at  its  outset,  be  compared  with  Words- 
worth's final  stage:  only,  as  I  have  asked  the  reader  to 
note,  the  procession  of  symbolic  and  enigmatic  forms 
and    actions    which    Keats    simmions    up    before    our 


/ 


128  CONTRASTS  OF  METHOD 

mind's  eye,  so  far  from  having  any  fixed  or  increasing 
character  of  pensiveness  or  gravity,  winds  up  with  a 
figure  of  sheer  animal  happiness  and  joy  of  life. 

Mr  Bridges  further  notes,  very  justly,  the  striking 
contrast   between  the  methods   of  the  elder  and  the 

/  younger  poet  in  these  passages,  defining  Wordsworth^s 
as  a  subjective  and  Keats's  as  an  objective  method.  I 
should  be  inclined  to  describe  the  same  difference  in 
another  way,  and  to  say  that  both  by  gift  and  purpose 
it  was  the  part  of  Wordsworth  to  nie(^tate^5^id_e^ound^ 
while  the  part  of  Keats  was  to  inmgme_aiid_eyoke. 

^Wordsworth,  bringing  strong  powers  of  abstract lhniEng~ 
toHbear  on  his  intense  and  intensely  realised  personal 
experience,  expoimds  the  spiritual  relations  of  man  to 
nature  as  he  conceives  them,  sometimes,  as  in  Tintern 
Ahhey  and  many  passages  of  The  Prelude  and  Excursion, 
with  more  revealing  insight  and  a  more  exalted  passion 
than  any  other  poet  has  attained;  sometimes,  alas! 
quite  otherwise,  when  his  passion  has  subsided,  and  he 
must  needs  to  go  back  upon  his  experiences  and  droningly 
and  flatly  analyse  and  explain  them.  "^Keats,  on  the  other 
hand,  had  a  mind  constitutionally  imapt  for  abstract 
thinking.  When  he  conceives  or  wishes  to  express  general 
ideas,  his  only  way  of  doing  so  is  by  calHng  up,  from  the 
multitudes  of  concrete  images  with  which  his  memory  and 
imagination  are  haunted,  such  as  strike  him  as  fitted  by 
their  colour  and  significance,  their  quaHty  of  association 
and  suggestion,  to  stand  for  and  symbolise  the  abstrac- 
tions working  in  his  mind;  and  in  this  concrete  and 
figurative  fashion  he  will  be  found,  by  those  who  take 
the  pains  to  follow  him,  to  think  coherently  and 
purposefully  enough.  Again,  Keats's  sense  of  personal 
identity  was  ever  ready  to  be  dissolved  and  carried 
under  by  the  strength  of  his  imaginative  sympathies. 
It  is  not  the  effect  of  nature  on  his  personal  self 
that  he  realises  and  ponders  over;  what  he  does  is 
with  ever-participating  joy  and  instantaneous  instinct 
to  go  out  into  the  doings  of  nature  and  lose  himself 
in  them.    In  the  result  he  neither  strives  for  nor  attains, 


EVOCATION   VERSUS  EXPOSITION       129 

as  Mr  Bridges  truly  points  out,  the  sheer  intellectual 
lucidity  which  Wordsworth  in  his  most  impassioned 
moments  never  loses.  But  as,  in  regard  to  nature, 
Wordsworth's  is  the  genius  of  luminous  exposition,  so 
Keats's,  even  among  the  immaturities  of  his  first  volume, 
is  the  genius  of  living  evocation. 


J    ■ 
CHAPTER  V 

APRIL-DECEMBER   1817:    WORK  ON  ENDYMION 

'Poems'  fall  flat — Reviews  by  Hunt  and  others — Change  of  publishers — 
New  friends:  Bailey  and  Woodhouse  —  Begins  Endymion  at  Caris- 
brooke — Moves  to  Margate — Hazlitt  and  Southey — Hunt  and  Haydon 
— Ambition  and  self-doubt — Stays  at  Canterbury — Joins  brothers  at 
Hampstead — Dilke  and  Brown — ^Visits  Bailey  at  Oxford — Work  on 
Endymion — ^Bailey's  testimony — Talk  on  Wordsworth — Letters  from 
Oxford — To  his  sister  Fanny — To  Jane  and  J.  H.  Reynolds — 
Return  to  Hampstead — Friends  at  loggerheads — Stays  at  Burford 
Bridge — Correspondence — Confessions — Speculations — Imagination  and 
truth — Composes  various  lyrics — 'O  love  me  truly' — 'In  drear-nighted 
December'  —  Dryden  and  Swinburne  —  Endymion  finished  —  An 
Autumnal  close — ^Return  to  Hampstead. 

Keats's  first  volume  had  been  launched,  to  quote  the 
words  of  Cowden  Clarke,  'amid  the  cheers  and  fond 
anticipations  of  all  his  circle.  Every  one  of  us  expected 
(and  not  unreasonably)  that  it  would  create  a  sensation 
in  the  literary  world/  The  magniloquent  Haydon  words 
these  expectations  after  his  manner: — 'I  have  read 
your  Sleep  and  Poetry — ^it  is  a  flash  of  lightning  that  will 
rouse  men  from  their  occupations  and  keep  them  trem- 
bling for  the  crash  of  thunder  that  will  follow. '  Sonnets 
poured  in  on  the  occasion,  and  not  from  intimates  only. 
I  have  already  quoted  (p.  75)  one  which  Reynolds, 
familiar  with  the  contents  of  the  forthcoming  book, 
wrote  a  few  days  before  its  publication  to  welcome  it 
and  at  the  same  time  to  congratulate  Keats  on  his  sonnet 
written  in  Clarke's  copy  of  the  Fhure  and  the  Lefe. 
Leigh  Hunt,  always  delighted  to  repay  compliment  with 
compliment,  replied  effusively  in  land  to  the  sonnet  in 

130 


'POEMS'  FALL  FLAT  131 

which  Keats  had  dedicated  the  volume  to  him.  Richard 
Woodhouse,  of  whom  we  shall  soon  hear  more  but  who 
was  as  yet  a  stranger,  in  the  closing  lines  of  a  sonnet 
addressed  to  Apollo,  welcomed  Keats  as  the  last  born 
son  of  that  divinity  and  the  herald  of  his  return  to 
lighten  the  poetic  darkness  of  the  land: — 

Have  these  thy  glories  perish'd  ?  or  in  scorn 

Of  thankless  man  hath  thy  race  ceased  to  quire  ? 

O  no  !  thou  hear'st !  for  lo  !  the  beamed  morn 
Chases  our  night  of  song:  and,  from  the  lyre 

Waking  long  dormant  sounds,  Keats,  thy  last  born, 
To  the  glad  realm  proclaims  the  coming  of  his  sire. 

Sonnets  are  not  often  addressed  by  publishers  to  their 
clients:  but  one  has  been  foimd  in  the  handwriting  of 
Charles  OUier,  and  almost  certainly  composed  by  him, 
expressing  admiration  for  Keats's  work.  The  brothers 
Oilier,  it  will  be  remembered,  were  Shelley's  pubHshers, 
and  for  a  while  also  Leigh  Hunt's  and  Lamb's,  and 
Charles  was  the  poetry-lo\dng  and  enthusiastic  brother 
of  the  two,  and  himself  a  writer  of  some  accom- 
plishment in  prose  and  verse.  But  in  point  of  fact, 
outside  the  immediate  Leigh  Hunt  circle,  the  volume 
made  extremely  Httle  impression,  and  the  public  was  as 
far  as  possible  from  being  roused  from  its  occupations 
or  made  tremble.  ^Alas!'  continues  Cowden  Clarke, 
'the  book  might  have  emerged  in  Timbuctoo  with  far 
stronger  chance  of  fame  and  appreciation.  The  whole 
community  as  if  by  compact,  seemed  determined  to  know 
nothing  about  it.' 

Clarke  here  somewhat  exaggerates  the  facts.  Leigh 
Hunt  kept  his  own  review  of  the  volume  back  for  some 
three  months,  very  likely  with  the  just  idea  that  praise 
from  him  might  prejudice  Keats  rather  than  serve  him. 
At  length  it  appeared,  in  three  successive  numbers  of  the 
Examiner  for  July,  the  first  nimiber  setting  forth  the 
aims  and  tendencies  of  the  new  movement  in  poetry 
with  a  conscious  clearness  such  as  to  those  taking  part  in 
a  collective,  three-parts  instinctive  effort  of  the  kind 
comes  usually  in  retrospect  only  and  not  in  the  thick 


132      REVIEWS  BY  HUNT  AND  OTHERS 

of  the  struggle.  In  the  second  and  third  notices  Hunt 
speaks  of  the  old  graces  of  poetry  reappearing,  warns 
'this  young  writer  of  genius'  against  disproportionate 
detail  and  a  too  revolutionary  handling  of  metre,  and 
after  quotation  winds  up  by  calKng  the  volume  'a  little 
luxuriant  heap  of  ,^ 

Such  sights  as  youthful  poets  dream 
On  summer  eves  by  haunted  stream.  * 

Two  at  least  of  the  established  critical  reviews  noticed 
the  book  at  length,  Constable's  Scots  and  Edinburgh 
Magazine^  and  the  Eclectic  Review,  the  chief  organ  of 
lettered  nonconformity,  owned  and  edited  by  the  busy 
dissenting  poet  and  bookseller  Josiah  Conder.  Both 
criticisms  are  of  the  preaching  and  admonishing  kind 
then  almost  universally  in  fashion.  The  Scottish  re- 
viewer recognises  in  the  new  poet  a  not  wholly  imsuc- 
cessful  disciple  of  Spenser,  but  warns  him  against  Hhe 
appalHng  doom  which  awaits  the  faults  of  mannerism 
or  the  ambition  of  a  sickly  refinement,'  and  with  reference 
to  his  association  with  the  person  and  ideas  of  Hazlitt 
and  Hunt  declares  that  'if  Mr  Keats  does  not  forthwith 
cast  off  the  uncleanness  of  this  school,  he  will  never  make 
his  way  to  the  truest  strain  of  poetry  in  which,  taking 
him  by  himself,  it  appears  he  might  succeed.'  The 
preachment  of  the  Eclectic  is  still  more  pompous  and 
superior.  There  are  mild  words  of  praise  for  some  of 
the  sonnets,  but  none  for  that  on  Chapman's  Homer. 
Sleep  and  Poetry ,  declares  the  critic,  would  seem  to  show  of 
the  writer  that  'he  is  indeed  far  gone,  beyond  the  reach  of 
the  efficacy  of  either  praise  or  censure,  in  affectation  and 
absurdity.  Seriously,  however,  we  regret  that  a  young 
man  of  vivid  imagination  and  fine  talents  should  have 
fallen  into  so  bad  hands  as  to  have  been  flattered  into  the 
resolution  to  publish  verses,  of  which  a  few  years  hence 
he  will  be  glad  to  escape  from  the  remembrance.' 

Notices  such  as  this  could  not  help  a  new  writer  to 
fame  or  his  book  to  sale.  But  before  they  appeared 
Keats  and  his  brothers,  or  they  for  him,  had  begun  to 


CHANGE  OF  PUBLISHERS  133 

fret  at  the  failure  of  the  volume  and  to  impute  it,  as 
authors  and  their  friends  will,  to  some  mishandling  by 
the  publishers.  George  in  John^s  absence  wrote  to  the 
Olliers  taking  them  to  task  pretty  roundly,  and  received 
the  often-quoted  reply  drafted,  let  us  hope,  not  by  the 
sonneteer  but  by  James  OlUer,  his  business  brother, 
and  alleging  of  the  work  that — 

By  far  the  greater  number  of  persons  who  have  purchased  it 
from  us  have  found  fault  with  it  in  such  plain  terms,  that  we 
have  in  many  cases  offered  to  take  it  back  rather  than  be 
annoyed  with  the  ridicule  which  has,  time  after  time,  been 
showered  upon  it.  In  fact,  it  was  only  on  Saturday  last  that 
we  were  under  the  mortification  of  having  our  own  opinion  of 
its  merits  flatly  contradicted  by  a  gentleman,  who  told  us  he 
considered  it  *no  better  than  a  take  in.' 

Meanwhile  Keats  had  found  other  pubHshers  ready  to 
take  up  his  next  work,  and  destined  to  become  his  staunch 
and  generous  friends.  These  were  Messrs  Taylor  and 
Hessey  of  93  Fleet  Street.  John  Taylor,  the  chief 
partner,  was  a  man  of  high  character  and  considerable 
attainments,  who  had  come  up  from  Nottinghamshire 
to  open  a  business  in  London  ten  years  earher.  He  was 
already  noted  as  an  authority  on  Junius  and  was  to  be 
a  little  later  the  editor  as  well  as  pubhsher  of  the  London 
Magazine^  and  the  good  friend  and  frequent  entertainer 
(in  the  back  parlour  of  the  publishing  house  in  Fleet 
Street)  of  his  most  distinguished  contributors.  How 
and  through  whom  Keats  was  introduced  to  his  firm  is 
not  quite  clear:  probably  through  Benjamin  Bailey,  a 
new  acquaintance  whom  we  know  to  have  been  a  friend 
of  Taylor's.  Bailey  was  an  Oxford  man  five  years 
older  than  Keats.  He  had  been  an  undergraduate  of 
Trinity  and  was  now  staying  up  at  Magdalen  Hall  to 
read  for  orders.  He  was  an  ardent  student  of  poetry 
and  general  literature  as  well  as  of  theology,  a  devout 
worshipper  of  Milton,  and  scarcely  less  of  Wordsworth, 
with  whom  he  had  some  personal  acquaintance.  Of 
his  appetite  for  books  Keats  wrote  when  they  had  come 
to  know  each  other  well:  'I  should  not  like  to  be  pages 


134   NEW  FRIENDS:  BAILEY  AND  WOODHOUSE 

in  your  way;  when  in  a  tolerably  hungry  mood  you  have 
no  mercy.  Your  teeth  are  the  Rock  Tarpeian  down 
which  you  capsize  epic  poems  like  mad.  I  would  not  for 
forty  shillings  be  Coleridge's  Lays  [i.e.  Lay  Sermons]  in 
your  way.'  Bailey  was  intimate  with  John  Hamilton 
Reynolds  and  his  family,  and  at  this  time  a  suitor  for 
the  hand  of  his  sister  Mariane.  In  the  course  of  the 
winter  1816-17  Reynolds  had  written  to  him  enthusias- 
tically of  Keats's  poetical  promise  and  personal  charm. 
When  at  the  beginning  of  March  Keats's  volume  came 
out,  Bailey  was  much  struck,  and  on  a  visit  to  London 
called  to  make  the  new  poet's  acquaintance.  Though 
it  was  not  until  a  few  months  later  that  this  acquaintance 
ripened  into  close  friendship,  it  may  well  have  been 
Bailey  who  recommended  Keats  and  Taylor  to  each  other. 

Relations  of  business  or  friendship  with  Taylor 
necessarily  involved  relations  with  Richard  Woodhouse, 
a  lettered  and  accomplished  young  solicitor  of  twenty- 
nine  who  was  an  intimate  friend  of  Taylor's  and  at  this 
time  apparently  the  regular  reader  and  adviser  to  the 
firm.  Woodhouse  was  sprung  from  an  old  landed  stock 
in  Herefordshire,  some  of  whose  members  were  now  in 
the  wine-trade  (his  father,  it  seems,  was  owner  or  part 
owner  of  the  White  Hart  at  Bath).  He  had  been 
educated  at  Eton  but  not  at  the  university:  his  extant 
correspondence,  as  well  as  notes  and  version-books  in 
his  hand,  show  him  to  have  been  a  good  linguist  in 
Spanish  and  Italian  and  a  man  of  remarkably  fine 
literary  taste  and  judgment.  He  afterwards  held  a  high 
position  as  a  solicitor  and  was  one  of  the  founders  of  the 
Law  Life  Insurance  Society. 

These  three  new  friendships,  with  Benjamin  Bailey, 
John  Taylor,  and  Richard  Woodhouse,  formed  during 
the  six  weeks  between  the  publication  of  his  book 
(March  3)  and  the  mid-April  following,  turned  out  to  be 
among  the  most  valuable  of  Keats's  life,  and  were  the 
best  immediate  results  the  issue  of  his  first  volume 
brought  him.  During  this  interval  he  and  his  brothers 
were  lodging  at   17  Cheapside,  having  left  their  old 


BEGINS  ENDYMION  AT  CARISBROOKE     135 

quarters  in  the  Poultry.  Some  time  in  March  it  was 
decided,  partly  on  Haydon's  urging,  that  John  should  for 
the  sake  of  quiet  and  self-improvement  go  and  spend 
some  time  by  himself  in  the  country,  and  try  to  get  to 
work  upon  his  great  meditated  Endymion  poem.  He 
writes  as  much  to  Reynolds,  concluding  with  an  adap- 
tation from  Falstaff  expressive  of  anxiety  for  the  health 
of  some  of  those  dear  to  him — probably  his  brother 
Tom  and  James  Rice: — 

My  brothers  are  anxious  that  I  should  go  by  myself  into  the 
country — they  have  always  been  extremely  fond  of  me,  and  now 
that  Haydon  has  pointed  out  how  necessary  it  is  that  I  should 
be  alone  to  improve  myself,  they  give  up  the  temporary  pleasure 
of  living  with  me  continually  for  a  great  good  which  I  hope  will 
follow.  So  I  shall  soon  be  out  of  Town.  You  must  soon  bring 
all  your  present  troubles  to  a  close,  and  so  must  I,  but  we  must, 
like  the  Fox,  prepare  for  a  fresh  swarm  of  flies.  Banish  money 
— Banish  sofas — Banish  Wine — Banish  Music;  but  right  Jack 
Health,  honest  Jack  Health,  true  Jack  Health — Banish  Health 
and  banish  all  the  world. 

On  the  14th  of  April  Keats  took  the  night  mail  for 
Southampton,  whence  he  writes  next  day  a  lively  letter 
to  his  brothers.  By  the  17th,  having  looked  at  Shanklin 
and  decided  against  it,  he  was  installed  in  a  lodging  at 
Carisbrooke.  Writing  to  Reynolds  he  gives  the  reasons 
for  his  choice,  mentioning  at  the  same  time  that  he  is 
feeling  rather  nervous  from  want  of  sleep,  and  enclosing 
the  admirable  sonnet  On  the  Sea  which  he  has  just 
composed — 

It  keeps  eternal  whisperings  around 
Desolate  shores,  etc. — 

It  was  the  intense  haunting  of  the  lines  in  the  scene  on 
Dover  Cliif  in  King  Lear  beginning  '  Do  you  not  hear  the 
sea,'  which  moved  him,  he  says,  to  this  effort.  He  was 
reading  and  re-reading  his  Shakespeare  with  passion,  and 
phrases  from  the  plays  come  up  continually  in  his  letters, 
not  only,  as  in  the  following  extract,  in  the  form  of  set 
quotations,  but  currently,  as  though  they  were  part  of 
his  own  mind  and  being.    Having  found  in  the  lodging- 


136  MOVES  TO  MARGATE 

house  passage  an  engraved  head  of  Shakespeare  which 
pleased  him  and  hung  it  up  in  his  room  (his  landlady 
afterwards  made  him  a  present  of  it),  he  bethinks  him 
of  the  approaching  anniversary,  April  23: — 

I'll  tell  you  what — on  the  23d  was  Shakespeare  born.  Now 
if  I  should  receive  a  letter  from  you,  and  another  from  my 
Brothers  on  that  day  'twould  be  a  parlous  good  thing.  Whenever 
you  write  say  a  word  or  two  on  some  Passage  in  Shakespeare 
that  may  have  come  rather  new  to  you,  which  must  be  continually 
happening,  notwithstanding  that  we  read  the  same  Play  forty 
times — for  instance,  the  following  from  the  Tempest  never  struck 
me  so  forcibly  as  at  present, 

Urchins 

Shall,  for  the  vast  of  night  that  they  may  work, 

All  exercise  on  thee — 

How  can  I  help  bringing  to  your  mind  the  line — 

In  the  dark  backward  and  abysm  of  time. 

I  find  I  cannot  exist  without  Poetry — without  eternal  Poetry — 
half  the  day  will  not  do — the  whole  of  it — I  began  with  a  little, 
but  habit  has  made  me  a  Leviathan.  I  had  become  all  in  a  Tremble 
from  not  having  written  anything  of  late — the  Sonnet  over-leaf 
did  me  good.  I  slept  the  better  last  night  for  it — this  Morning, 
however,  I  am  nearly  as  bad  again.  Just  now  I  opened  Spenser, 
and  the  first  Lines  I  saw  were  these — 

The  noble  heart  that  harbours  virtuous  thought. 
And  is  with  child  of  glorious  great  intent, 
Can  never  rest  until  it  forth  have  brought 
Th'  eternal  brood  of  glory  excellent. 

'I  shall  forthwith  begin  my  Endymion/  he  adds,  and 
looks  forward  to  reading  some  of  it  out,  when  his  corre- 
spondent comes  to  visit  him,  in  a  nook  near  the  castle 
which  he  has  already  marked  for  the  purpose. 

But  Haydon's  prescription  of  solitude  turned  out  the 
worst  Keats  could  well  have  followed  in  the  then  state 
of  his  mind,  fermenting  with  a  thousand  restless  thoughts 
and  inchoate  imaginations  and  with  the  feverish  conflict 
between  ambition  and  self-distrust.  The  result  at  any 
rate  was  that  he  passed  the  time,  to  use  his  own  words, 
'in  continual  burning  of  thought,  as  an  only  resource,' 
and  what  with  that  and  lack  of  proper  food  felt  himself 


HAZLITT  AND  SOUTHEY  137 

after  a  week  or  ten  days  'not  over  capable  in  his  upper 
stories'  and  in  need  of  change  and  companionship.  He 
made  straight  for  his  last  year's  lodging  at  Margate  and 
got  Tom  to  join  him  there.  Thence  in  the  second  week 
of  May  he  writes  a  long  letter  to  Hunt  and  another  to 
Hay  don.  To  Hunt  he  criticises  some  points  in  the  last 
number  of  the  Examiner,  and  especially,  in  his  kind- 
hearted,  well-conditioned  way,  deprecates  a  certain 
vicious  allusion  to  grey  hairs  in  an  attack  of  Hazlitt 
upon  Southey.  Later  on  we  shall  have  to  tell  of  the 
critical  savagery  of  Blackwood  and  the  Quarterly,  now 
long  since  branded  and  proverbial.  But  it  should  be 
borne  in  mind,  as  it  by  no  means  always  is,  that  the  Tories 
were  far  from  having  the  savagery  to  themselves.  When 
HazHtt,  for  one,  chose  to  strike  on  the  liberal  side,  he 
could  match  Gilford  or  Lockhart  or  Wilson  or  Maginn  with 
their  own  weapons.  To  realise  the  controversial  atmos- 
phere of  the  time,  here  is  a  passage,  and  not  the  fiercest, 
from  the  Hazlitt  article  in  which  Keats  found  too 
venomous  a  sting.  Southey's  first  love,  rails  Hazlitt, 
had  been  the  Republic,  his  second  was  Legitimacy,  'her 
more  fortunate  and  wealthy  rival':  — 

He  is  becoming  uxorious  in  his  second  matrimonial  connection; 
and  though  his  false  Duessa  has  turned  out  a  very  witch,  a 
murderess,  a  sorceress,  perjured,  and  a  harlot,  drunk  with  insol- 
ence, mad  with  power,  a  griping  rapacious  wretch,  bloody, 
luxurious,  wanton,  malicious,  not  sparing  steel,  or  poison,  or 
gold,  to  gain  her  ends — bringing  famine,  pestilence,  and  death 
in  her  train — infecting  the  air  with  her  thoughts,  killing  the 
beholders  with  her  looks,  claiming  mankind  as  her  property, 
and  using  them  as  her  slaves — driving  everything  before  her, 
and  playing  the  devil  wherever  she  comes,  Mr  Southey  sticks 
to  her  in  spite  of  everything,  and  for  very  shame  lays  his  head 
in  her  lap,  paddles  with  the  palms  of  her  hands,  inhales  her 
hateful  breath,  leers  in  her  eyes  and  whispers  in  her  ears,  calls 
her  little  fondling  names.  Religion,  Morality,  and  Social  Order, 
takes  for  his  motto, 

Be  to  her  faults  a  little  blind. 
Be  to  her  virtues  very  kind — 

sticks  close  to  his  filthy  bargain,  and  will  not  give  her  up,  because 
she  keeps  him,  and  he  is  down  in  her  will.     Faugh ! 


138  HUNT  AND  HAYDON 

It  is  fair  to  note  that  the  mistress  thus  depicted  as 
Southey's  is  an  allegorical  being,  while  the  Blackwood 
scurrilities  were  often  directly  personal. 

After  asking  how  Hunt^s  own  new  poem,  The  Nymphs^ 
is  getting  on,  Keats  tells  how  he  has  been  writing  some 
of  Endymion  every  day  the  last  fortnight,  except  travel- 
ling days,  and  how  thoughts  of  the  greatness  of  his 
ambition  and  the  uncertainty  of  his  powers  have  thrown 
him  into  a  fit  of  gloom;  hinting  at  such  moods  of  bleak 
and  blank  despondency  as  we  shall  find  now  and  again 
figuratively  described  in  the  text  of  Endymion  itself. 

I  have  asked  myself  so  often  why  I  should  be  a  poet  more 
than  other  men,  seeing  how  great  a  thing  it  is,  .  .  .  that  at  last 
the  idea  has  grown  so  monstrously  beyond  my  seeming  power 
of  attainment  that  the  other  day  I  nearly  consented  with  myself 
to  drop  into  a  Phaeton  ...  I  see  nothing  but  continual  uphill 
journeying.  Now  is  there  anything  more  unpleasant  than  to 
be  so  journeying  and  to  miss  the  goal  at  last?  But  I  intend 
to  whistle  all  those  cogitations  into  the  sea,  where  I  hope  they 
will  breed  storms  enough  to  block  up  all  exit  from  Russia.  Does 
Shelley  go  on  telling  strange  stories  of  the  deaths  of  kings  ?  ^ 
Tell  him  there  are  strange  stories  of  the  deaths  of  poets.  Some 
have  died  before  they  were  conceived. 

The  same  evening  Keats  begins  to  answer  a  letter 
of  encouragement  and  advice  he  had  just  had  from 
Haydon.  This  is  the  letter  of  Haydon's  from  which 
I  have  already  quoted  the  passage  about  the  efficacy 
of  prayer  as  Haydon  had  experienced  it.  Perfectly 
sincere  and  genuinely  moved,  he  can  never  for  a 
minute  continuously  steer  clear  of  rant  and  fustian  and 
self-praise  at  another's  expense. 

Never  despair,  he  goes  on,  while  the  path  is  open  to  you.  By 
habitual  exercise  you  will  have  habitual  intercourse  and  constant 
companionship;  and  at  every  want  turn  to  the  Great  Star  of  your 
hopes  with  a  delightful  confidence  that  will  never  be  disappointed. 
I  love  you  like  my  own  brother:  Beware,  for  God's  sake,  of  the 
delusions  and  sophistications  that  are  ripping  up  the  talents  and 

1  'Sad  stories'  in  the  original  text  of  Richard  II.  The  allusion  is  to  the 
well-known  incident  of  Shelley  alarming  an  old  lady  in  a  stage  coach  by 
suddenly  breaking  out  with  this  quotation.  Whether  Keats  had  been  in 
his  company  at  the  time  we  do  not  know. 


AMBITION  AND  SELF-DOUBT  139 

morality  of  our  friend.^  He  will  go  out  of  the  world  the  victim 
of  his  own  weakness  and  the  dupe  of  his  own  self-delusions,  with 
the  contempt  of  his  enemies  and  the  sorrow  of  his  friends,  and  the 
cause  he  undertook  to  support  injured  by  his  own  neglect  of 
character.  I  wish  you  would  come  up  to  town  for  a  day  or 
two  that  I  may  put  your  head  in  my  picture.  I  have  rubbed 
in  Wordsworth's,  and  advanced  the  whole.  God  bless  you,  my 
dear  Keats!  do  not  despair;  collect  incident,  study  character, 
read  Shakespeare,  and  trust  in  Providence,  and  you  will  do, 
you  must. 

Keats  in  answer  quotes  the  opening  speech  of  the 
King  in  Lovers  Labour^ s  Lost, — 

Let  Fame,  that  all  pant  after  in  their  lives 
Live  registered  upon  our  brazen  tombs,  etc., 

saying  that  he  could  not  bear  to  think  he  had  not  the 
right  to  couple  his  own  name  with  Haydon's  in  such  a 
forecast,  and  acknowledging  the  occasional  moods  of  de- 
pression which  have  put  him  into  such  a  state  of  mind 
as  to  read  over  his  own  lines  and  hate  them,  though  he 
has  picked  up  heart  again  when  he  foimd  some  from 
Pope's  Homer  which  Tom  read  out  to  him  seem  'like 
Mice'  to  his  own.  He  takes  encouragement  also  from 
the  notion  that  has  visited  him  lately  of  some  good 
genius — can  it  be  Shakespeare? — ^presiding  over  him. 
Continuing  the  next  day,  he  is  downhearted  again  at 
hearing  from  George  of  money  difficulties  actual  and 
prospective.  'You  tell  me  never  to  despair — I  wish  it 
was  as  easy  for  me  to  deserve  the  saying — ^truth  is  I 
have  a  horrid  morbidity  of  Temperament  which  has 
shown  itself  at  intervals  it  is  I  have  no  doubt  the  greatest 
Enemy  and  stumbling  block  I  have  to  fear — I  may  even 
say  it  is  likely  to  be  the  cause  of  my  disappointment.' 
Then  referring  to  Haydon's  warning  in  regard  to  Hunt, 
he  goes  half  way  in  agreement  and  declares  he  would 
die  rather  than  be  deceived  about  his  own  achievements 
as  Hunt  is.  'There  is  no  greater  sin  after  the  seven 
deadly,'  he  says,  'than  to  flatter  oneself  into  the  idea 
of  being  a  great  poet:    the  comfort  is,  such  a  crime 

*  'Our  friend'  of  course  is  Leigh  Hunt. 


140  STAYS  AT  CANTERBURY 

must  bring  its  own  penalty,  and  if  one  is  a  self-deluder 
indeed  accounts  must  one  day  be  balanced/ 

In  the  same  week,  moved  no  doubt  by  the  difficulties 
George  had  mentioned  about  touching  the  funds  due 
from  their  grandmother's  estate,  Keats  writes  to  Taylor 
and  Hessey,  in  a  lively  and  famiHar  strain  showing  the 
terms  of  confidence  on  which  he  already  stood  with  them, 
asking  them  to  advance  him  an  instalment  of  the  agreed 
price  for  Endymion.  He  mentions  in  this  letter  that  he 
is  tired  of  Margate  (he  had  already  to  another  correspon- 
dent called  it  a  Hreeless  affair')  and  means  to  move  to 
Canterbury.  At  this  point  there  occurs  an  unlucky  gap 
in  Keats's  correspondence.  We  know  that  he  and  Tom 
went  to  Canterbury  from  Margate  as  planned,  but  we 
do  not  know  exactly  when,  nor  how  long  he  stayed 
there,  nor  what  work  he  did  (except  that  he  was  certainly 
going  on  with  the  first  book  of  Endymion),  nor  what 
impressions  he  received.  It  was  his  first  visit  to  a  cathe- 
dral city,  and  few  in  the  world,  none  in  England,  are 
more  fitted  to  impress.  Chichester  and  Winchester  he 
came  afterwards  to  know,  Winchester  well  and  with 
affection;  but  it  was  with  thoughts  of  Canterbury  in 
his  mind  that  he  planned,  some  two  years  later,  first  a 
serious  and  then  a  frivolous  verse  romance  having  an 
English  cathedral  town  for  scene  {The  Eve  of  St  Mark, 
The  Cap  and  Bells).  The  heroine  of  both  was  to  have 
been  a  maiden  of  Canterbury  called  Bertha;  not,  of 
course,  the  historic  Frankish  princess  Bertha,  daughter 
of  Haribert  and  wife  of  Ethelbert  king  of  Kent,  who 
converted  her  husband  and  prepared  his  people  for 
Christianity  before  the  landing  of  Saint  Augustin,  and 
who  sleeps  in  the  ancient  church  of  Saint  Martin  outside 
the  walls:  not  she,  but  some  damsel  of  the  city,  named 
after  her  in  later  days,  whom  Keats  had  heard  or  read 
of  or  invented, — I  would  fain  know  which;  but  I  have 
found  no  external  evidence  of  his  studies  or  doings 
during  this  spring  stay  at  Canterbury,  and  his  corre- 
spondence is,  as  I  have  said,  a  blank. 

Some  time  in  June  he  returned  and  the  three  brothers 


JOINS  BROTHERS  AT  HAMPSTEAD      141 

were  together  again:  not  now  in  City  lodgings  but  in 
new  quarters  to  which  they  had  migrated  in  Well  Walk, 
Hampstead.  Their  landlord  was  one  Bentley  the  post- 
man, with  whom  they  seem  to  have  got  on  well  except 
that  Keats  occasionally  complains  of  the  ^yoimg  carrots/ 
his  children,  now  for  making  a  'horrid  row,'  now  for 
smelling  of  damp  worsted  stockings.  The  lack  of  letters 
continues  through  these  first  summer  months  at  Hamp- 
stead. The  only  exception  is  a  laughingly  apologetic 
appeal  to  his  new  pubhshers  for  a  further  advance  of 
money,  dated  June  10th  and  ending  with  the  words, — 
'I  am  sure  you  are  confident  of  my  responsibihty,  and 
of  the  sense  of  squareness  that  is  always  in  me.'  For 
the  rest,  indirect  evidence  allows  us  to  picture  Keats 
in  these  months  as  working  regularly  at  Endymion, 
having  now  reached  the  second  book,  and  as  Hving 
socially,  not  without  a  certain  amount  of  convivial 
claret-drinking  and  racket,  in  the  company  of  his 
brothers  and  of  his  friends  and  theirs.  Leigh  Hunt 
was  still  close  by  in  the  Vale  of  Health,  and  both  in 
his  circle  and  in  Haydon's  London  studio  Keats  was  as 
welcome  as  ever.  Reynolds  and  Rice  were  still  his 
close  intimates,  and  Reynolds's  sisters  in  Lamb's  Conduit 
Street  almost  like  sisters  of  his  own.  He  was  scarcely 
less  at  home  in  the  family  of  his  sister-in-law  that  was  to 
be,  Georgiana  Wyhe.  The  faithful  Severn  and  the  faith- 
ful Haslam  came  up  eagerly  whenever  they  could  to 
join  the  Hampstead  party.  An  acquaintance  he  had 
already  formed  at  Hunt's  with  the  Charles  Dilkes  and 
their  friend  Charles  Brown,  who  Hved  as  next-door 
neighbours  at  Wentworth  Place,  a  double  block  of 
houses  of  their  own  building  in  a  garden  at  the  foot  of 
the  Heath,  now  ripened  into  friendship:  that  with 
Dilke  rapidly,  that  with  Brown,  a  Scotsman  who  by 
his  own  account  held  cannily  aloof  from  Keats  at  first 
for  fear  of  being  thought  to  push,  more  slowly. 

Charles  Wentworth  Dilke,  by  profession  a  clerk  in 
the  Navy  Pay  Office,  by  predilection  a  keen  and  pains- 
taking literary  critic  and  antiquar}^,  had  been  stimulated 


142  DILKE  AND  BROWN 

by  the  charm  of  Lamb's  famous  volume  of  Specimens 
to  work  at  the  old  English  dramatic  poets,  and  had 
recently  (being  now  twenty-seven)  brought  out  a  set  of 
volumes  in  continuation  of  Dodsley's  Old  Plays.  In 
matters  poHtical  and  social  he  was  something  of  a 
radical  doctrinaire  and  ^Godwin-perfectibility  man' 
(the  label  is  Keats's),  loving  decision  and  positiveness 
in  all  things  and  being  therein  the  very  opposite  of 
Keats,  who  by  rooted  instinct  as  well  as  choice  allowed 
his  mind  to  cherish  uncertainties  and  to  be  a  thorough- 
fare for  all  thoughts  (the  phrase  is  again  his  own).  There 
were  many  but  always  friendly  discussions  between 
Keats  and  Dilke,  and  their  mutual  regard  never  failed. 
Charles  Brown,  Dilke's  contemporary,  schoolfellow,  and 
close  friend,  was  a  man  of  Scottish  descent  born  in 
Lambeth,  who  had  in  early  youth  joined  a  business  set 
up  by  an  elder  brother  in  Petersburg.  The  business 
quickly  faihng,  he  had  returned  to  London  and  after 
some  years  of  struggle  inherited  a  modest  competence 
from  another  brother.  A  lively,  cultivated,  moderately 
successful  amateur  in  literature,  journaHsm,  and  drama, 
he  was  in  person  bald  and  spectacled,  and  portly  beyond 
his  years  though  active  and  robust;  in  habits  much  of 
a  trencher-man  (^a  huge  eater'  according  to  the  ab- 
stemious Trelawny)  and  something  of  a  viveur  within  his 
means;  exactly  strict  in  money  matters,  but  otherwise 
far  from  a  precisian  in  life  or  conversation;  an  ardent 
friend  and  genial  companion,  though  cherishing  some 
fixed  unreasonable  aversions:  in  a  word,  a  truly  Scot- 
tish blend  of  glowing  warm-heartedness  and  Hhrawn' 
prejudice,  of  frank  joviality  and  cautious  dealing. 

It  was  in  these  same  weeks  of  June  or  July  1817,  soon 
after  the  beginning  of  the  Oxford  vacation,  that  Ben- 
jamin Bailey  again  came  to  town  and  sought  after  and 
learned  to  delight  in  Keats's  company.  He  meant  to 
go  back  and  read  at  Oxford  for  the  latter  part  of  the 
vacation,  and  invited  Keats  to  spend  some  weeks  with 
him  there.  Keats  accepted,  and  the  visit,  lasting  from 
soon  after  mid  August  until  the  end  of  September, 


VISITS  BAILEY  AT  OXFORD  143 

proved  a  happiness  alike  to  host  and  guest.  At  this 
point  our  dearth  of  documents  ceases.  Bailey's  memor- 
anda, though  not  put  on  paper  till  thirty  years  later, 
are  vivid  and  informing,  and  Keats's  own  correspondence 
during  the  visit  is  fairly  full.  I  will  take  Bailey's  recol- 
lections first,  and  give  them  in  his  own  words,  seeing 
that  they  paint  the  writer  almost  as  weU  as  his  subject; 
omitting  only  passages  that  seem  to  drag  or  interrupt. 
First  comes  the  impression  Keats  made  on  him  at  the 
time  of  their  introduction  in  the  spring,  and  then  his 
account  of  the  days  they  spent  together  in  Oxford. 


I  was  delighted  with  the  naturalness  and  simplicity  of  his 
character,  and  was  at  once  drawn  to  him  by  his  winning  and 
indeed  affectionate  manner  towards  those  with  whom  he  was 
himself  pleased.  Nor  was  his  personal  appearance  the  least 
charm  of  a  first  acquaintance  with  the  young  poet.  He  bore, 
along  with  the  strong  impress  of  genius,  much  beauty  of  feature 
and  countenance.  His  hair  was  beautiful — a  fine  brown,  rather 
than  auburn,  I  think,  and  if  you  placed  your  hand  upon  his 
head,  the  silken  curls  felt  like  the  rich  plumage  of  a  bird.  The 
eye  was  full  and  fine,  and  softened  into  tenderness,  or  beamed 
with  a  fiery  brightness,  according  to  the  current  of  his  thoughts 
and  conversation.  Indeed  the  form  of  his  head  was  like  that  of 
a  fine  Greek  statue: — and  he  realized  to  my  mind  the  youthful 
Apollo,  more  than  any  head  of  a  living  man  whom  I  have  known. 

At  the  commencement  of  the  long  vacation  I  was  again  in 
London,  on  my  way  to  another  part  of  the  country:  and  it  was 
my  intention  to  return  to  Oxford  early  in  the  vacation  for  the 
purpose  of  reading.  I  saw  much  of  Keats.  And  I  invited  him 
to  return  with  me  to  Oxford,  and  spend  as  much  time  as  he  could 
afford  with  me  in  the  silence  and  solitude  of  that  beautiful  place 
during  the  absence  of  the  numerous  members  and  students  of 
the  University.  He  accepted  my  offer,  and  we  returned  together. 
I  think  in  August  1817.  It  was  during  this  visit,  and  in  my 
room,  that  he  wrote  the  third  book  of  Endymvm.  .  .  .  His  mode 
of  composition  is  best  described  by  recounting  our  habits  of 
study  for  one  day  during  the  month  he  visited  me  at  Oxford. 
He  wrote,  and  I  read,  sometimes  at  the  same  table,  and  some- 
times at  separate  desks  or  tables,  from  breakfast  to  the  time  of 
our  going  out  for  exercise, — generally  two  or  three  o'clock.  He 
sat  down  to  his  task, — which  was  about  50  lines  a  day, — with 
his  paper  before  him,  and  wrote  with  as  much  regularity,  and 
apparently  as  much  ease,  as  he  wrote  his  letters.  ,  .  .  Sometimes 


144  WORK  ON  ENDYMION 

he  fell  short  of  his  allotted  task,  but  not  often:  and  he  would 
make  it  up  another  day.  But  he  never  forced  himself.  When 
he  had  finished  his  writing  for  the  day,  he  usually  read  it  over 
to  me:  and  he  read  or  wrote  letters  until  we  went  for  a  walk. 
This  was  our  habit  day  by  day.  The  rough  manuscript  was 
written  off  daily,  and  with  few  erasures. 

I  remember  very  distinctly,  though  at  this  distance  of  time, 
his  reading  of  a  few  passages;  and  I  almost  think  I  hear  his 
voice,  and  see  his  countenance.  Most  vivid  is  my  recollection 
of  the  following  passage  of  the  finest  affecting  story  of  the  old 
man,  Glaucus,  which  he  read  to  me  immediately  after  its  com- 
position:— 

The  old  man  raised  his  hoary  head  and  saw 

The  wildered  stranger — seeming  not  to  see. 

The  features  were  so  lifeless.     Suddenly 

He  woke  as  from  a  trance;  his  snow  white  brows 

Went  arching  up,  and  like  two  magic  ploughs 

Furrowed  deep  wrinkles  in  his  forehead  large, 

Which  kept  as  fixedly  as  rocky  marge, 

Till  round  his  withered  lips  had  gone  a  smile. 

The  lines  I  have  italicised,  are  those  which  then  forcibly  struck 
me  as  peculiarly  fine,  and  to  my  memory  have  *kept  as  fixedly 
as  rocky  marge.'  I  remember  his  upward  look  when  he  read 
of  the  'magic  ploughs,'  which  in  his  hands  have  turned  up  so 
much  of  the  rich  soil  of  Fairyland. 

When  we  had  finished  our  studies  for  the  day  we  took  our 
walk,  and  sometimes  boated  on  the  Isis.  .  .  .  Once  we  took  a 
longer  excursion  of  a  day  or  two,  to  Stratford  upon  Avon,  to 
visit  the  birthplace  of  Shakespeare.  We  went  of  course  to  the 
house  visited  by  so  many  thousands  of  all  nations  of  Europe, 
and  inscribed  our  names  in  addition  to  the  'numbers  numberless' 
of  those  which  literally  blackened  the  walls.  We  also  visited 
the  Church,  and  were  pestered  with  a  commonplace  showman  of 
the  place.  .  .  .  He  was  struck,  I  remember,  with  the  simple 
statue  there,  which,  though  rudely  executed,  we  agreed  was  most 
probably  the  best  likeness  of  the  many  extant,  but  none  very 
authentic,  of  Shakespeare. 

His  enjoyment  was  of  that  genuine,  quiet  kind  which  was  a 
part  of  his  gentle  nature;  deeply  feeling  what  he  truly  enjoyed, 
but  saying  little.  On  our  return  to  Oxford  we  renewed  our  quiet 
mode  of  life,  until  he  finished  the  third  Book  of  Endymion,  and 
the  time  came  that  we  must  part;  and  I  never  parted  with  one 
whom  I  had  known  so  short  a^  time,  with  so  much  real  regret 
and  personal  affection,  as  I  did  with  John  Keats,  when  he  left 


t/rcm   an   eie^^rvt-^^fu:  vn  tJi^J^alwTiai0ortriut^cdL€yrjj- 


r,.   C/)aU„  l'J,.u^ 


BAILEY'S  TESTIMONY  145 

Oxford  for  London  at  the  end  of  September  or  the  beginning  of 
October  1817. 

Living  as  we  did  for  a  month  or  six  weeks  together  (for  I  do 
not  remember  exactly  how  long)  I  knew  him  at  that  period  of 
his  life,  perhaps  as  well  as  any  one  of  his  friends.  There  was  no 
reserve  of  any  kind  between  us.  .  .  .  His  brother  George  says  of 
him  that  to  his  brothers  his  temper  was  uncertain;  and  he 
himself  confirms  this  judgment  of  him  in  a  beautiful  passage  of 
a  letter  to  myself.  But  with  his  friends,  a  sweeter  tempered 
man  I  never  knew.  Gentleness  was  indeed  his  proper  char- 
acteristic, without  one  particle  of  dullness,  or  insipidity,  or  want 
of  spirit.  Quite  the  contrary.  'He  was  gentle  but  not  fearful,' 
in  the  chivalric  and  moral  sense  of  the  term  *  gentle.'  He  was 
pleased  with  every  thing  that  occurred  in  the  ordinary  mode  of 
life,  and  a  cloud  never  passed  over  his  face,  except  of  indignation 
at  the  wrongs  of  others. 

His  conversation  was  very  engaging.  He  had  a  sweet  toned 
voice,  *an  excellent  thing'  in  man  as  well  as  *in  woman.  .  .  .' 
In  his  letters  he  talks  of  suspecting  everybody.  It  appeared 
not  in  his  conversation.  On  the  contrary,  he  was  uniformly 
the  apologist  for  poor,  frail  human  nature,  and  allowed  for 
people's  faults  more  than  any  man  I  ever  knew,  especially  for 
the  faults  of  his  friends.  But  if  any  act  of  wrong  or  oppression, 
of  fraud  or  falsehood,  was  the  topic,  he  rose  into  sudden  and 
animated  indignation.  He  had  a  truly  poetic  feeling  for  women; 
and  he  often  spoke  to  me  of  his  sister,  who  was  somehow  with- 
holden  from  him,  with  great  delicacy  and  tenderness  of  affection. 
He  had  a  soul  of  noble  integrity:  and  his  common  sense  was  a 
conspicuous  part  of  his  character.  Indeed  his  character  was  in 
the  best  sense  manly. 

Our  conversation  rarely  or  never  flagged,  during  our  walks, 
or  boatings,  or  in  the  evening.  And  I  have  retained  a  few  of 
his  opinions  on  Literature  and  criticism  which  I  will  detail.  The 
following  passage  from  Wordsworth's  Ode  on  Immortality  was 
deeply  felt  by  Keats,  who  however  at  this  time  seemed  to  me  to  .  / 
value  this  great  Poet  rather  in  particular  passages  than  in  the 
full-length  portrait,  as  it  were,  of  the  great  imaginative  and 
philosophic  Christian  Poet,  which  he  really  is,  and  which  Keats 
obviously,  not  long  afterwards,  felt  him  to  be. 

Not  for  these  I  raise 
The  song  of  thanks  and  praise; 
But  for  those  obstinate  questionings 
Of  sense  and  outward  things. 
Fallings  from  us,  vanishings; 
Blank  misgivings  of  a  creature 


J 


146  TALK  ON  WORDSWORTH 

Moving  about  in  worlds  not  realized, 

High  instincts,  before  which  our  mortal  nature 

Did  tremble  like  a  guilty  thing  surprized. 

The  last  lines  he  thought  were  quite  awful  in  their  application 
to  a  guilty  finite  creature,  like  man,  in  the  appalling  nature  of 
the  feeling  which  they  suggested  to  a  thoughtful  mind.  Again, 
we  often  talked  of  that  noble  passage  in  the  lines  on  Tintem 
Abbey: — 

That  blessed  mood. 

In  which  the  burthen  of  the  mystery, 

In  which  the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 

Of  all  this  unintelligible  world 

Is  lightened. 

And  his  references  to  this  passage  are  frequent  in  his  letters. — 
But  in  those  exquisite  stanzas. 


ending,- 


She  dwelt  among  the  untrodden  ways, 
Beside  the  springs  of  Dove. 

She  lived  unknown  and  few  could  know 

When  Lucy  ceased  to  be; 

But  she  is  in  her  grave,  and  oh. 

The  difference  to  me. 

\J    The  simplicity  of  the  last  line  he  declared  to  be  the  most  perfect 
pathos. 

Among  the  qualities  of  high  poetic  promise  in  Keats  was, 
even  at  this  time,  his  correct  taste.  I  remember  to  have  been 
struck  with  this  by  his  remarks  on  that  well  known  and  often 
quoted  passage  of  the  Excursion  upon  the  Greek  Mythology — 
where  it  is  said  that 

Fancy  fetched 
Even  from  the  blazing  chariot  of  the  Sun 
A  beardless  youth  who  touched  a  golden  lute. 
And  filled  the  illumined  groves  vrith  ravishment. 

Keats  said  this  description  of  Apollo  should  have  ended  at  the 
*  golden  lute,'  and  have  left  it  to  the  imagination  to  complete 
the  picture,  how  he  'filled  the  illumined  groves.'  I  think 
every  man  of  taste  will  feel  the  justice  of  the  remark. 

Every  one  now  knows  what  was  then  known  to  his  friends 
that  Keats  was  an  ardent  admirer  of  Chatterton.  The  melody 
of  the  verses  of  the  marvellous  Boy  who  perished  in  his  pride, 
enchanted  the  author  of  Endymion.  Methinks  I  now  hear  him 
recite,  or  chant,  in  his  peculiar  manner,  the  following  stanza  of 
the  Roundelay  sung  by  the  minstrels  of  Ella: — 


LETTERS  FROM  OXFORD  147 

Come  loitk  acorn  cup  and  thorn 
Drain  my  hertys  blood  away; 
Life  and  all  its  good  I  scorn; 
Dance  by  night  or  feast  by  day. 

The  first  line  to  his  ear  possessed  the  great  charm.  Indeed  his 
sense  of  melody  was  quite  exquisite,  as  is  apparent  in  his  own 
verses;  and  in  none  more  than  in  numerous  passages  of  his 
Endymion. 

Another  object  of  his  enthusiastic  admiration  was  the  Homeric 
character  of  Achilles — especially  when  he  is  described  as  '  shouting 
in  the  trenches/  One  of  his  favourite  topics  of  discourse  was  the 
principle  of  melody  in  verse,  upon  which  he  had  his  own  notions, 
particularly  in  the  management  of  open  and  close  vowels.  I 
think  I  have  seen  a  somewhat  similar  theory  attributed  to  Mr 
Wordsworth.  But  I  do  not  remember  his  laying  it  down  in 
writing.  Be  this  as  it  may,  Keats's  theory  was  worked  out  by 
himself.  It  was,  that  the  vowels  should  be  so  managed  as  not 
to  clash  one  with  another,  so  as  to  hear  the  melody, — and  yet 
that  they  should  be  interchanged,  like  differing  notes  of  music 
to  prevent  monotony.  .  .  .^ 

Bailey  here  tries  to  reconstruct  and  illustrate  from 
memory  Keats's  theory  of  vowel  sounds,  but  his  attempt 
falters  and  breaks  down. 

Keats's  own  first  account  of  himself  from  Oxford  is  in 
a  letter  of  September  5th  to  the  Reynolds  sisters,  then 
on  holiday  at  Littlehampton:  a  piece  of  mere  lively 
foolery  and  rattle  meant  to  amuse,  in  a  taste  which  is  not 
that  of  to-day.  Five  days  later  he  writes  the  first  of 
that  series  of  letters  to  his  young  sister  Fanny  which 
acquaints  us  with  perhaps  the  most  loveable  and  admir- 
able parts  of  his  character.  She  was  now  just  fourteen, 
and  living  under  the  close  guardianship  of  the  Abbej^s, 
who  had  put  her  to  a  boarding  school  at  Walthamstow. 
Keats  shows  a  tender  and  considerate  elder-brotherly 
anxiety  to  get  into  touch  with  her  and  know  her  feelings 
and  likings: — 

Let  us  now  begin  a  regular  question  and  answer — a  little  pro 
and  con;  letting  it  interfere  as  a  pleasant  method  of  my  coming 
at  your  favourite  little  wants  and  enjoyments,  that  I  may  meet 
them  in  a  way  befitting  a  brother. 

1  Houghton  MSS. 


148  TO  HIS  SISTER  FANNY 

We  have  been  so  little  together  since  you  have  been  able  to 
reflect  on  things  that  I  know  not  whether  you  prefer  the  History 
of  King  Pepin  to  Bunyan's  Pilgrim's  Progress — or  Cinderella  and 
her  glass  slipper  to  Moor's  Almanack.  However  in  a  few  Letters 
I  hope  I  shall  be  able  to  come  at  that  and  adapt  my  scribblings 
to  your  Pleasure.  You  must  tell  me  about  all  you  read  if  it  be  only 
six  Pages  in  a  Week  and  this  transmitted  to  me  every  now  and 
then  will  procure  full  sheets  of  Writing  from  me  pretty  frequently. 
— ^This  I  feel  as  a  necessity  for  we  ought  to  become  intimately 
acquainted,  in  order  that  I  may  not  only,  as  you  grow  up  love 
you  as  my  only  Sister,  but  confide  in  you  as  my  dearest  friend. 
When  I  saw  you  last  I  told  you  of  my  intention  of  going  to 
Oxford  and  'tis  now  a  Week  since  I  disembark'd  from  his  Whip- 
ship's  Coach  the  Defiance  in  this  place.  I  am  living  in  Magdalen 
Hall  on  a  visit  to  a  young  Man  with  whom  I  have  not  been  long 
acquainted,  but  whom  I  like  very  much — we  lead  very  industrious 
lives — ^he  in  general  Studies  and  I  in  proceeding  at  a  pretty  good 
rate  with  a  Poem  which  I  hope  you  will  see  early  in  the  next 
year. — ^Perhaps  you  might  like  to  know  what  I  am  writing  about. 
I  will  tell  you.  Many  Years  ago  there  was  a  young  handsome 
Shepherd  who  fed  his  flocks  on  a  Mountain's  Side  called  Latmus 
he  was  a  very  contemplative  sort  of  a  Person  and  lived  solitary 
among  the  trees  and  Plains  little  thinking  that  such  a  beautiful 
Creature  as  the  Moon  was  growing  mad  in  Love  with  him. — 
However  so  it  was;  and  when  he  was  asleep  on  the  Grass  she 
used  to  come  down  from  heaven  and  admire  him  excessively 
for  a  long  time;  and  at  last  could  not  refrain  from  carrying 
him  away  in  her  arms  to  the  top  of  that  high  Mountain  Latmus 
while  he  was  a  dreaming — but  I  dare  say  you  have  read  this  and 
all  the  other  beautiful  Tales  which  have  come  down  from  the 
ancient  times  of  that  beautiful  Greece,  If  you  have  not  let  me 
know  and  I  will  tell  you  more  at  large  of  others  quite  as  delightful. 
This  Oxford  I  have  no  doubt  is  the  finest  City  in  the  world — it 
is  full  of  old  Gothic  buildings — Spires — towers — Quadrangles — 
Cloisters — Groves  etc  and  is  surrounded  with  more  clear  streams 
than  ever  I  saw  together.  I  take  a  Walk  by  the  Side  of  one  of 
them  every  Evening  and,  thank  God,  we  have  not  had  a  drop 
of  rain  these  days. 

He  goes  on  to  tell  her  (herein  echoing  Hunt^s  opinion) 
how  much  better  it  would  be  if  Italian  instead  of  French 
were  taught  everywhere  in  schools,  and  winds  up: — 

Now  Fanny  you  must  write  soon — and  write  all  you  think  about, 
never  mind  what — only  let  me  have  a  good  deal  of  your  writing 
— ^You  need  not  do  it  all  at  once — be  two  or  three  or  four  days 


TO  JANE  AND  J.  H.  REYNOLDS         149 

about  it,  and  let  it  be  a  diary  of  your  Life.  You  will  preserve 
all  my  Letters  and  I  will  secure  yours — and  thus  in  the  course 
of  time  we  shall  each  of  us  have  a  good  Bundle — which,  hereafter, 
when  things  may  have  strangely  altered  and  God  knows  what 
happened,  we  may  read  over  together  and  look  with  pleasure  on 
times  past — that  now  are  to  come. 

Next  follows  another  letter  to  Jane  Reynolds;  partly 
making  fun,  much  better  fun  than  in  the  last,  about 
Dilke's  shooting  and  about  the  rare  havoc  he  would  Hke 
to  make  in  Mrs  Dilke's  garden  were  he  at  Hampstead: 
partly  grave  in  the  high  style  into  which  he  is  apt  at  any 
moment  to  change  from  nonsense: — 

Now  let  us  turn  to  the  sea-shore.  Believe  me,  my  dear  Jane, 
it  is  a  great  happiness  to  see  that  you  are,  in  this  finest  part  of 
the  year,  winning  a  little  enjoyment  from  the  hard  world.  In 
truth,  the  great  Elements  we  know  of,  are  no  mean  comforters: 
the  open  sky  sits  upon  our  senses  like  a  sapphire  crown — the 
Air  is  our  robe  of  state — the  Earth  is  our  throne  and  the  Sea  a 
mighty  minstrel  playing  before  it — able,  like  Da\ad's  harp,  to 
make  such  a  one  as  you  forget  almost  the  tempest  cares  of  life. 
I  have  found  in  the  ocean's  music, — varying  (tho'  self-same) 
more  than  the  passion  of  Timotheus,  an  enjoyment  not  to  be 
put  into  words;  and,  *  though  inland  far  I  be,'  I  now  hear  the 
voice  most  audibly  while  pleasing  myself  in  the  idea  of  your 
sensations. 

To  Reynolds  Keats  writes  on  September  the  21st: — 

For  these  last  five  or  six  days,  we  have  had  regularly  a  Boat 
on  the  Isis,  and  explored  all  the  streams  about,  which  are  more 
in  number  than  your  eye-lashes.  We  sometimes  skim  into  a 
Bed  of  rushes,  and  there  become  naturalized  river-folks, — there 
is  one  particularly  nice  nest,  which  we  have  christened  *  Rey- 
nolds's Cove,'  in  which  we  have  read  Wordsworth,  and  talked 
as  may  be;  I  think  I  see  you  and  Hunt  meeting  in  the  Pit. — 
What  a  very  pleasant  fellow  he  is,  if  he  would  give  up  the 
sovereignty  of  a  room  pro  bono.  WTiat  evenings  we  might  pass 
with  him,  could  we  have  him  from  Mrs  H.  Failings  I  am  always 
rather  rejoiced  to  find  in  a  man  than  sorry  for;  they  bring  us  to 
a  level. 

Then  follows  a  diatribe  against  the  literary  and  intel- 
lectual pretensions  of  certain  sets  of  ladies,  from  which 
he  has  felt  an  agreeable  reHef  in  some  verses  he  has 


150  RETURN  TO  HAMPSTEAD 

found  on  taking  down  from  Bailey^s  shelves  the  poems 
of  Katherine  Phillips,  Hhe  matchless  Orinda/  The 
verses  which  pleased  him,  truly  of  her  best,  are  those 
To  M.  A.  at  parting,  and  Keats  goes  on  to  copy  them 
in  full.  Had  Orinda  been  a  contemporary,  he  might  not, 
indeed,  have  failed  to  recognise  in  her  a  true  woman  of 
letters:  but  would  he  not  also  have  found  something 
to  laugh  and  chafe  at  in  the  poses  of  that  high-flying 
coterie  of  mutual  admirers,  Silvander  and  PoHarchus, 
Lucasia  and  Rosania  and  Palaemon,  of  which  she  was 
the  centre?  This  is  one  of  the  very  few  instances  to 
be  found  in  Keats's  work  or  correspondence  of  interest 
in  the  poetry  of  the  Carohne  age. 

Quite  in  the  last  days  of  his  visit  Keats,  whose  mind 
and  critical  power  had  been  growing  while  he  worked 
upon  Endymion,  and  whom  moreover  the  long  effort  of 
composition  was  clearly  beginning  to  fatigue,  confides 
to  Haydon  his  dissatisfaction  with  what  he  has  done: — 
'You  will  be  glad  to  hear  that  within  these  last  three 
weeks  I  have  written  1000  lines — which  are  the  third 
Book  of  my  Poem.  My  Ideas  with  respect  to  it  I  assure 
you  are  very  low — and  I  would  write  the  subject 
thoroughly  again — ^but  I  am  tired  of  it  and  think  the 
time  would  be  better  spent  in  writing  a  new  Romance 
which  I  have  in  my  eye  for  next  summer — Rome  was 
not  built  in  a  day — and  all  the  good  I  expect  from  my 
employment  this  summer  is  the  fruit  of  Experience  which 
I  hope  to  gather  in  my  next  Poem.' 

Coming  back  in  the  first  week  of  October  to  Hamp- 
stead,  whither  his  brothers  had  by  this  time  also  returned 
from  a  trip  to  Paris,  Keats  was  presently  made  imcom- 
fortable  by  evidences  of  discord  among  his  friends  and 
reports  of  what  seemed  like  disloyalty  on  the  part  of  one 
of  them,  Leigh  Hunt,  to  himself.  Haydon  had  now  left 
the  studio  in  Great  Marlborough  Street  for  one  in 
Lisson  Grove,  and  the  Hunts,  having  come  away  from 
Hampstead  and  paid  a  long  late-summer  visit  to  the 
Shelleys  at  Marlow,  were  lodging  near  him  in  the  same 
street.     *  Everybody  seems  at  loggerheads,'  Keats  writes 


FRIENDS  AT  LOGGERHEADS  151 

to  Bailey.  'There's  Hunt  infatuated — there's  Haydon's 
picture  in  statu  quo — ^There's  Hunt  walks  up  and  down 
his  painting-room — criticising  every  head  most  unmerci- 
fully/ Both  Haydon  and  Reynolds,  he  goes  on,  keep 
telling  him  tales  of  Hunt:  How  Himt  has  been  talking 
flippantly  and  patronisingly  of  Endymiariy  saying  that 
if  it  is  four  thousand  lines  long  now  it  would  have  been 
seven  thousand  but  for  him,  and  giving  the  impression 
that  Keats  stood  to  him  in  the  relation  of  a  pupil  needing 
and  taking  advice.  He  declares  in  consequence  that  he 
is  quite  disgusted  with  literary  men  and  will  never  know 
another  except  Wordsworth;  and  then,  more  coolly  and 
sensibly,  'now,  is  not  this  a  most  paltry  thing  to  think 
about  ?  .  .  .  This  is,  to  be  sure,  the  vexation  of  a  day,  nor 
would  I  say  so  many  words  about  it  to  any  but  those 
whom  I  know  to  have  my  welfare  and  reputation  at  heart.' 
During  the  six  or  seven  autimm  weeks  spent  at 
Hampstead  after  his  return  from  Oxford  Keats  was 
getting  on,  a  Httle  flaggingly,  with  the  fourth  book  of 
Endymion,  besides  writing  an  occasional  lyric  or  two. 
Fresh  from  the  steadying  and  sympathetic  companion- 
ship of  Bailey,  he  keeps  up  their  intimacy  by  affectionate 
letters  in  which  he  discloses  much  of  that  which  lay 
deepest  and  was  best  in  him.  Writing  in  the  first  days 
of  November  he  congratulates  Bailey  on  having  got  a 
curacy  in  Cumberland  and  promises  some  day  to  visit 
him  there;  says  he  is  in  a  fair  way  to  have  finished 
Endymion  in  three  weeks;  mentions  an  idea  he  has  of 
shipping  his  brother  Tom,  who  has  been  looking  worse, 
off  to  Lisbon  for  the  winter  and  perhaps  going  with  him; 
and  gets  in  by  a  side  wind  a  masterly  criticism  of  Words- 
worth's poem  The  Gipsies  and  also  of  HazHtt's  criticism 
of  it  in  the  Round  Table.  A  fragment  of  another  letter, 
dated  November  the  5th,  alludes  with  annoyance,  not 
for  the  first  time,  to  some  failure  of  Haydon's  to  keep 
his  word  or  take  trouble  about  a  young  man  from 
Oxford  named  Cripps  whom  he  had  promised  to  receive 
as  pupil  and  in  whom  Bailey  and  Keats  were  interested. 
The  same  fragment  records  the  appearance  in  Blackwood 


152  STAYS  AT  BURFORD  BRIDGE 

(the  Eiidinhurgh  Magazine,  as  Keats  calls  it)  of  the 
famous  first  article  of  the  Cockney  School  series,  attacking 
Hunt  with  a  virulence  far  beyond  even  the  accustomed 
licence  of  the  time,  and  seeming  by  the  motto  prefixed 
to  it  (verses  of  Cornelius  Webb  coupling  the  names  of 
Hunt  and  Keats)  to  threaten  a  similar  handling  of 
Keats  later  on.  'I  don't  mind  the  thing  much/  says 
Keats,  'but  if  he  should  go  to  such  lengths  with  me  as 
he  has  done  with  Himt,  I  must  infallibly  call  him  to  an 
Account  if  he  be  a  human  being,  and  appears  in  Squares 
and  Theatres,  where  we  might  possibly  meet — I  don't 
relish  his  abuse/ 

Some  time  about  mid-November  Keats,  his  health  and 
strength  being  steadier  than  in  the  spring,  felt  himself 
in  the  mood  for  a  few  weeks  of  solitude  and  went  to 
spend  them  at  Burford  Bridge  Inn,  in  the  beautiful  vale 
of  Mickleham  between  Leatherhead  and  Dorking.  The 
outing,  he  wrote,  was  intended  'to  change  the  scene — 
change  the  air — and  give  me  a  spur  to  wind  up  my  poem, 
of  which  there  are  wanting  500  lines.'  Keats  dearly 
loved  a  valley:  he  loved  even  the  sound  of  the  names 
denoting  one.  In  his  marginal  notes  to  a  copy  of 
Paradise  Lost  he  gave  a  friend  we  find  the  following: — 

*  Or  have  ye  chosen  this  place 
After  the  toil  of  battle  to  repose 
Your  wearied  virtue,  for  the  ease  you  find 
To  slumber  here,  as  in  the  vales  of  Heaven?* 

There  is  cool  pleasure  in  the  very  sound  of  vale.  The  English 
word  is  of  the  happiest  chance.  Milton  has  put  vales  in  heaven 
and  hell  with  the  very  utter  affection  and  yearning  of  a  great 
Poet.  It  is  a  sort  of  Delphic  Abstraction — a  beautiful  thing 
made  more  beautiful  by  being  reflected  and  put  in  a  Mist.  The 
next  mention  of  Vale  is  one  of  the  most  pathetic  in  the  whole 
range  of  Poetry: — 

*  Others,  more  mild. 
Retreated  in  a  silent  valley,  sing 
With  notes  angelical  to  many  a  harp 
Their  own  heroic  deeds  and  hapless  fall 
By  doom  of  battle.' 

How  much  of  the  charm  is  in  the  valley  I 


CORRESPONDENCE  153 

There,  from  his  inmost  self,  speaks  a  poet  of  another 
poet,  and  as  if  to  and  for  poets,  deep  calling  unto  deep. 
But  in  his  every-day  vein  of  speech  or  writing  Keats 
was  always  reticent  in  regard  to  the  scenery  of  places 
he  visited,  disliking  nothing  more  than  the  glib  ecstasies 
of  the  tourist  in  search  of  the  picturesque.  When  he 
has  looked  roimd  him  in  his  new  quarters  at  Burford 
Bridge  he  says  simply,  writing  to  Reynolds  on  November 
the  22nd,  'I  like  this  place  very  much.  There  is  Hill 
and  Dale  and  a  little  river.  I  went  up  Box  Hill  this 
evening  after  the  moon — "you  dJ  seen  the  Moon" — 
came  down  and  wrote  some  lines.'  'Whenever  I  am 
separated  from  you,'  he  continues,  'and  not  engaged  in 
a  continuous  Poem,  every  letter  shall  bring  you  a  lyric — 
but  I  am  too  anxious  for  you  to  enjoy  the  whole  to  send 
you  a  particle:'  the  whole,  that  is,  of  Endymion,  The 
sequel  shows  him  to  be  just  as  deep  and  ardent  in  the 
study  of  Shakespeare  as  when  he  was  beginning  his 
poem  at  Carisbrooke  in  the  spring.  'I  never  found  so 
many  beauties  in  the  Sonnets — they  seem  to  be  full  of 
fine  things  said  unintentionally — ^in  the  intensity  of 
working  out  conceits:'  and  he  goes  on  to  quote  passages 
and  phrases  both  from  them  and  from  VeniLS  and  Adonis. 
Next,  with  a  sudden  change  of  mind  about  letting  Rey- 
nolds see  a  sample  of  Endymion,  'By  the  Whim-King! 
I'll  give  you  a  stanza,  because  it  is  not  material  in  con- 
nexion, and  when  I  wrote  it  I  wanted  you  to  give  your 
vote,  pro  or  con.' — ^The  stanza  he  gives  is  from  the  song 
of  the  Constellations  in  the  fourth  book,  certainly  one  of 
the  weakest  things  in  the  poem:  pity  Reynolds  had  not 
been  there  indeed,  to  give  his  vote  contra. 

On  the  same  day,  November  22,  Keats  writes  to  Bailey 
a  letter  even  richer  in  contents  and  more  self-revealing 
than  this  to  Reynolds.  It  gives  the  indispensable  key 
both  to  much  in  his  own  character  and  much  of  the  deeper 
speculative  and  symbolic  meanings  underlying  his  work, 
from  Endymion  to  the  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn.  Beginning 
with  a  wise  and  tolerant  reference  to  the  Haydon  trouble, 
and  throwing  out  a  passing  hint  of  the  distinction  between 


154  CONFESSIONS 

men  of  Genius,  who  have  not,  and  men  of  Power,  who 
have,  a  proper  individual  self  or  determined  character  of 
their  own,  Keats  passes  at  the  close  to  an  illuminating 
self-confession  which  is  also  a  contrast  between  himself 
and  his  correspondent : — 

You  perhaps  at  one  time  thought  there  was  such  a  thing  as 
worldly  happiness  to  be  arrived  at,  at  certain  periods  of  time 
marked  out, — you  have  of  necessity  from  your  disposition  been 
thus  led  away — I  scarcely  remember  counting  upon  any  happiness 
— I  look  not  for  it  if  it  be  not  in  the  present  hour, — nothing 
startles  me  beyond  the  moment.  The  Setting  Sun  will  always 
set  me  to  rights,  or  if  a  Sparrow  come  before  my  Window,  I  take 
part  in  its  existence  and  pick  about  the  gravel.  The  first  thing 
that  strikes  me  on  hearing  a  misfortune  having  befallen  another 
is  this — *Well,  it  cannot  be  helped:  he  will  have  the  pleasure 
of  trying  the  resources  of  his  Spirit' — and  I  beg  now,  my  dear 
Bailey,  that  hereafter  should  you  observe  anything  cold  in  me 
not  to  put  it  to  the  account  of  heartlessness,  but  abstraction — 
for  I  assure  you  I  sometimes  feel  not  the  influence  of  a  passion 
or  affection  during  a  whole  Week — and  so  long  this  sometimes 
continues,  I  begin  to  suspect  myself,  and  the  genuineness  of  my  feel- 
ings at  other  times — thinking  them  a  few  barren  Tragedy  Tears. 

Readers  of  Endymion  will  recognize  a  symboHc  embodi- 
ment of  a  mood  akin  to  this  in  the  Cave  of  Quietude  in 
the  fourth  book.  But  the  great  value  of  the  letter, 
especially  great  as  a  help  to  the  study  of  Endymion  in 
general,  is  in  the  long  central  passage  setting  forth  his 
speculations  as  to  the  relation  of  imagination  to  truth, 
meaning  truth  ultimate  or  transcendental.  He  finds  his 
clue  in  the  eighth  book  of  Paradise  Lost,  where  Adam, 
recoimting  to  Raphael  his  first  experiences  as  new- 
created  man,  tells  how  twice  over  he  fell  into  a  dream 
and  awoke  to  find  it  true:  his  first  dream  thus  confirmed 
in  the  result  being  how  'One  of  shape  divine'  took  him 
by  the  hand  and  led  him  into  the  garden  of  Paradise:^ 
his  second,  how  the  same  glorious  shape  came  to  him 
and  opened  his  side  and  from  his  rib  fashioned  a  creature: 

Manlike,  but  different  sex,  so  lovely  fair, 
That  what  seem'd  fair  in  all  the  World,  seem'd  now 
1  Paradise  Lost,  viii,  288-311. 


SPECULATIONS  155 

Mean,  or  in  her  sum'd  up,  in  her  contained 
And  in  her  looks,  which  from  that  time  infused 
Sweetness  into  my  heart,  unfelt  before, 
And  into  all  things  from  her  Air  inspir'd 
The  spirit  of  love  and  amorous  delight. 
She  disappear'd,  and  left  me  dark,  I  wak'd 
To  find  her,  or  for  ever  to  deplore 
Her  loss,  and  other  pleasures  all  abjure: 
When  out  of  hope,  behold  her,  not  far  off. 
Such  as  I  saw  her  in  my  dream,  adorn'd 
With  what  all  Earth  or  Heaven  could  bestow 
To  make  her  amiable.^ 

It  was  no  doubt  this  second  of  Adam^s  dreams  that  was 
chiefly  in  Keats^s  mind.  His  way  of  explaining  his 
specidations  to  his  friend  is  quite  imstudied  and  incon- 
secutive; he  is,  as  he  says,  'continually  running  away 
from  the  subject,'  or  shall  we  say  letting  the  stream  of 
his  ideas  branch  out  into  side  channels  from  which  he 
finds  it  difficult  to  come  back?  But  yet  their  main 
current  and  piuport  will  be  foimd  not  difficult  to  follow, 
if  only  the  reader  will  bear  one  thing  well  in  mind: 
that  when  Keats  in  this  and  similar  passages  spealcs  of 
'Sensations'  as  opposed  to  'Thoughts'  he  does  not  limit 
the  word  to  sensations  of  the  body,  of  what  intensity 
or  exquisiteness  soever  or  howsoever  instantaneously 
transforming  themselves  from  sensation  into  emotion: 
what  he  means  arpjnt.nitinnfi  nf  thp  TYiinH  flTid  spirit  as 
immediate  as  these,  asjbhrijjinglyLconvind^ 
putablejs'urdependent  ofall  consecutive  stages  a,nd 
formal  processes  of  thinking:  almost  the  same  things, 
indeed7  as  m  a  later  passage  of  the  same  letter  he  calls 
'ethereal  musings.'  And  now  let  the  poet  speak  for 
himself: — 

O !  I  wish  I  was  as  certain  of  the  end  of  all  your  troubles  as 
that  of  your  momentary  start  about  the  authenticity  of  the 
Imagination.  I  am  certain  of  nothing  but  of  the  holiness  of 
the  Heart's  affections,  and  the  truth  of  Imagination.  "\Miat  the 
Imagination  seizes  as  Beauty  must  be  Truth — ^whether  it  existed 
before  or  not, — for  I  have  the  same  idea  of  all  our  passions  as  of 

»/bid.viii,  452-490. 


156  IMAGINATION  AND  TRUTH 

Love:  they  are  all,  in  their  sublime,  creative  of  essential  Beauty. 
In  a  Word  you  may  know  my  favourite  speculation  by  my  first 
Book,  and  the  little  Song  I  sent  in  my  last,  which  is  a  repre- 
sentation from  the  fancy  of  the  probable  mode  of  operating  in 
these  Matters.  The  Imagination  may  be  compared  to  Adam's 
dream,  he  awoke  and  found  it  truth: — I  am  more  zealous  in 
this  affair,  because  I  have  never  yet  been  able  to  perceive  how 
anything  can  be  known  for  truth  by  consecutive  reasoning — 
and  yet  it  must  be.  Can  it  be  that  even  the  greatest  Philosopher 
ever  arrived  at  his  Goal  without  putting  aside  numerous 
objections?  However  it  may  be,  O  for  a  life  of  Sensations 
rather  than  of  Thoughts !  It  is  *  a  Vision  in  the  form  of  Youth,' 
a  shadow  of  reality  to  come — and  this  consideration  has  further 
convinced  me, — for  it  has  come  as  auxiliary  to  another  favourite 
speculation  of  mine, — that  we  shall  enjoy  ourselves  hereafter  by 
having  what  we  called  happiness  on  Earth  repeated  in  a  finer 
tone.  And  yet  such  a  fate  can  only  befall  those  who  delight  in 
Sensation,  rather  than  hunger  as  you  do  after  Truth.  Adam's 
dream  will  do  here,  and  seems  to  be  a  Conviction  that  Imagina- 
tion and  its  empyreal  reflexion,  is  the  same  as  human  life  and 
its  spiritual  repetition.  But,  as  I  was  saying,  the  simple  imagin- 
ative Mind  may  have  its  rewards  in  the  repetition  of  its  own 
silent  Working  coming  continually  on  the  Spirit  with  a  fine 
Suddenness.  To  compare  great  things  with  small,  have  you 
never,  by  being  surprised  with  an  old  Melody,  in  a  delicious  place 
by  a  delicious  voice,  felt  over  again  your  very  speculations  and 
surmises  at  the  time  it  first  operated  on  your  soul?  Do  you 
not  remember  forming  to  yourself  the  Singer's  face — more  beau- 
tiful than  it  was  possible,  and  yet,  with  the  elevation  of  the 
Moment,  you  did  not  think  so?  Even  then  you  were  mounted 
on  the  Wings  of  Imagination,  so  high  that  the  prototype  must 
be  hereafter — that  delicious  face  you  will  see. 

There  is  one  sentence  in  the  above  which  gives  us  special 
matter  for  regret.  Keats  speaks  of  Hhe  Httle  Song  I 
sent  in  my  last,  which  is  a  representation  from  the  fancy 
of  the  probable  mode  of  operating  in  these  matters.' 
Such  a  song,  if  we  had  it,  would  doubtless  put  forth 
clearly  and  melodiously  in  concrete  imagery  the  ideas 
which  Keats  in  his  letter  tries  to  expound  in  the  abstract 
language  of  which  he  is  by  nature  so  much  less  a  master. 
Of  ^my  last,'  that  is  of  his  preceding  letter  to  Bailey, 
unhappily  but  a  fragment  is  preserved,  and  the  song 
must  have  been  lost  with  the  sheet  or  sheets  which  went 


COMPOSES  VARIOUS  LYRICS  157 

astray,  seeing  that  none  of  Keats's  preserved  lyrics  can 
be  held  to  answer  to  his  account  of  this  one.  His  words 
have  a  further  interest  as  proving  that  now  in  these 
days  of  approaching  winter,  with  his  long  poem  ahnost 
finished,  he  allowed  himself  to  digress  into  some  lyric 
experiments,  as  in  its  earlier  stages  he  had  not  done. 
External  testimony  and  reasonable  inference  enable  us 
to  identify  some  of  these  experiments.  Two  or  three 
lightish  love-lyrics,  whether  impersonal  or  inspired  by 
passing  adventures  of  his  own,  are  among  the  number. 
That  beginning  'Think  not  of  it,  sweet  one,  so,'  dates 
definitely  from  November  11,  before  he  left  Hampstead. 
To  nearly  about  the  same  time  belongs  almost  certainly 
the  very  daintily  finished  stanzas  'Unfelt,  unheard, 
unseen,'  which  one  at  least  of  Keats's  subtlest  critics  ^ 
considers  (I  cannot  agree  with  her)  the  first  of  his 
technically  faultless  achievements.  So  also,  I  am  con- 
vinced, does  that  much  less  happily  wrought  thing,  the 
little  love-plaint  discovered  only  two  years  ago  and 
beginning — 

You  say  you  love,  but  with  a  voice 
Chaster  than  a  nun*s  who  singeth 

The  soft  vespers  to  herself 

When  the  chime-bell  ringeth — 
O  love  me  truly ! 

You  say  you  love;  but  with  a  smile 

Cold  as  sunrise  in  September, 
As  you  were  St  Cupid's  nun, 

And  kept  his  week  of  Ember. 
O  love  me  truly ! — 

and  so  forth.  Here  again,  it  seems  evident,  we  have  an 
instance  of  an  echo  from  one  of  the  old  EHzabethan 
poets  (this  time  an  anonymous  song-writer)  lingering 
like  a  chime  in  Keats's  memory.  Listen  to  the 
first  three  stanzas  of  A  Proper  Wooing  Song,  written 
to  the  time  of  the  Merchant's  Daughter  and  printed 

*  The  late  precociously  ^fted  and  prematurely  lost  Mary  Suddard,  in 
Essays  and  Stvdies  (Cambridge,  1912). 


158  '0  LOVE  ME  TRULY' 

in  Clement  Robinson's  Handful  of  Pleasant  Delites, 
1584:— 

Maide  will  ye  loue  me  yea  or  no  ? 

tell  me  the  trothe  and  let  me  go. 
It  can  be  no  lesse  than  a  sinful  deed,  ) 

trust  me  truly,  ^ 

To  linger  a  Louer  that  lookes  to  speede, 

in  due  time  duly. 

You  maides  that  thinke  yourselves  as  fine, 

as  Venus  and  all  the  Muses  nine: 
The  Father  Himselfe  when  He  first  made  man, 

trust  me  truly. 
Made  you  for  his  helpe  when  the  world  began, 

in  due  time  duly. 

Then  sith  God's  will  was  even  so 

why  should  you  disdaine  your  Louer  tho  ? 

But  rather  with  a  willing  heart, 
loue  him  truly; 

For  in  so  doing  you  do  your  part 
let  reason  rule  ye. 

The  metrical  form  of  Keats's  verses  is  not,  indeed,  the 
same  as  that  of  the  Elizabethan  song,  but  I  think  he 
must  certainly  have  had  the  cadence  of  its  refrains  more 
or  less  consciously  in  his  mind's  ear.^ 

A  definite  and  dated  case  of  a  lyrical  experiment 
suggested  to  Keats  at  this  time  by  an  older  model  is 
the  famous  little  ^ drear-nighted  December'  song  in 
which  he  re-embodies,  with  new  and  seasonable  imagery, 
the  ancient  moral  of  the  misery  added  to  misery  by  the 
remembrance  of  past  happiness.  This  was  composed,  as 
Woodhouse  on  the  express  testimony  of  Jane  Reynolds 
informs  us,  in  the  beginning  of  this  same  December, 
1817,  when  Keats  was  finishing  Endymion  at  Burford 

» If  it  is  objected  that  The  Handful  of  Pleasant  Delites  is  an  excessively 
rare  book,  which  Keats  is  not  likely  to  have  known,  the  answer  is  that  it 
had  been  reprinted  three  years  earher  in  Heliconia,  the  great  three-volume 
collection  edited  by  Thomas  Park;  and  moreover  that  Park,  one  of  the 
most  zealous  and  learned  of  researchers  in  the  field  of  old  English  literature, 
had  long  been  living  in  Church  Row,  Hampstead,  and  both  as  neighbour 
and  elder  fellow-worker  can  hardly  fail  to  have  been  known  to  Dilke  and 
his  circle. 


^N  DREAR-NIGHTED  DECEMBER'       159 

Bridge.  Any  reader  familiar  with  the  aspect  of  the  spot 
at  that  season,  when  the  overhanging  trees  have  shed 
their  last  gold,  and  spars  of  ice  have  begun  to  fringe  the 
sluggish  meanderings  of  the  Mole,  will  realise  how  deepl}^ 
the  sentiment  of  the  scene  and  season  has  sunk  into 
Keats's  verse.  Well  as  the  piece  is  known,  I  shall  quote 
it  entire,  not  in  the  form  in  which  it  is  printed  in  the 
editions,  but  in  that  in  which  alone  it  exists  in  his  own 
hand-writing  and  in  the  transcripts  by  his  friends 
Woodhouse  and  Brown  ^: — 


In  drear-nighted  December, 

Too  happy,  happy  tree, 
Thy  branches  ne'er  remember 

Their  green  feUcity: 
The  north  cannot  undo  them. 
With  a  sleety  whistle  through  them; 
Nor  frozen  thawings  glue  them 

From  budding  at  the  prime. 

In  drear-nighted  December, 

Too  happy,  happy  brook. 
Thy  bubblings  ne'er  remember 

Apollo's  summer  look; 
But  with  a  sweet  forgetting. 
They  stay  their  crystal  fretting. 
Never,  never  petting 

About  the  frozen  time. 

Ah !  would  'twere  so  with  many 

A  gentle  girl  and  boy ! 
But  were  there  ever  any 

Writh'd  not  at  passed  joy  ? 
The  feel  of  not  to  feel  it. 
When  there  is  none  to  heal  it. 
Nor  numbed  sense  to  steel  it. 

Was  never  said  in  rhyme.^ 

» Crewe  MSS. 

2  This  poem  was  first  printed  posthumously  in  1829:  both  in  The  Gem, 
a  periodical  of  the  Keepsake  type  then  edited  by  Thomas  Hood,  and  in 
Galignani's  collective  edition  of  the  poems  of  Coleridge,  Shelley,  and  Keats 
published  the  saine  year  in  Paris.  In  these  and  all  versions  subsequently 
printed  the  first  lines  of  stanzas  I  and  II  are  altered  and  read  '  In  a  drear- 
nighted  December,'  and  the  fifth  line  is  made  to  run,  'To  know  the  change 
and  feel  it.'     The  first  line  thus  gets  two  light  syllables  instead  of  one 


160  DRYDEN  AND  SWINBURNE 

Keats's  model  in  this  instance  is  a  song  from  Dryden's 
Spanish  Fryar,  a  thing  rather  beside  his  ordinary  course 
of  reading:  can  he  perhaps  have  taken  the  volume  con- 
taining it  from  Bailey's  shelveS;  as  he  took  the  poems 
of  Orinda?  Here  is  a  verse  to  show  the  tune  as  set  by 
Dryden: — 

Farewell  ungrateful  Traitor, 

Farewell  my  perjured  swain. 
Let  never  injured  creature 

Believe  a  man  again. 
The  pleasure  of  possessing 
Surpasses  all  expressing. 
But  'tis  too  short  a  blessing, 

And  Love  too  long  a  pain. 


before  the  first  stress,  giving  a  faint  suggestion  of  a  triple-time  movement 
which  certainly  does  not  hurt  the  metre.  The  new  fifth  line  is  to  modem 
ears  more  elegant  than  the  original,  as  getting  rid  of  the  vulgar  substantive 
form  'feel'  for  feeling.  But  'feel,'  which  after  all  had  been  good  enough  for 
Horace  Walpole  and  Fanny  Burney,  was  to  Keats  and  the  Leigh  Hunt  circle 
no  vulgarism  at  all,  it  was  a  thing  of  every  day  usage  both  in  verse  and 
prose.  And  does  not  the  correction  somewhat  blunt  the  point  of  Keats's 
meaning?  To  be  emphatically  aware  of  no  longer  feeling  a  joy  once 
felt  is  a  pain  that  may  indeed  call  for  steeling  or  healing,  while  to  steel 
or  heal  a  'change'  seems  neither  so  easy  nor  so  needful:  at  all  events 
the  phrase  is  more  lax.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  the  alterations  are 
due  to  Keats  at  all  and  not  to  someone  (conceivably,  in  the  case  of  The 
Gem,  Thomas  Hood)  editing  him  after  his  death.  I  should  add,  however, 
that  I  have  found  what  must  perhaps  be  regarded  as  evidence  that  Keats 
did  try  various  versions  of  this  final  stanza,  in  the  shape  of  another  tran- 
script made  in  1827  by  a  brother  of  his  friend  Woodhouse.  In  this  version 
the  poem  is  headed  Pain  of  Memory,  an  apt  title,  and  while  the  first  and 
second  stanzas  keep  their  original  form,  the  third  runs  quite  differently, 
as  follows: — 

But  in  the  Soul's  December 

The  fancy  backward  strays, 
And  darkly  doth  remember 

The  hue  of  golden  days, 
In  woe  the  thought  appalling 
Of  bUss  gone  past  recalling 
Brings  o'er  the  heart  a  falling 

Not  to  be  told  in  rhyme. 

This  can  hardly  be  other  than  an  alternative  version  tried  by  Keats  himself. 
The  'Falhngs  from  us,  vanishings'  of  Wordsworth's  Ode  on  Intimations 
of  Immmtaliiy,  may  be  responsible  for  the  'falling'  in  the  seventh  Une, 
and  though  'the  thought  appalUng'  is  a  common-place  phrase  Uttle  in 
Keats's  manner,  it  is  worth  noting  that  the  word  occurs  in  Bailey's  report 
of  his  spoken  comment  on  this  very  passage  of  Wordsworth  (see  above, 
p.  146). 


ENDYMION  FINISHED  161 

Do  readers  recall  what  the  greatest  of  metrical  raagi- 
cians,  who  would  be  so  very  great  a  poet  if  metrical 
magic  were  the  whole  of  poetry,  or  if  the  body  of  thought 
and  imagination  in  his  work  had  commonly  half  as 
much  vitality  as  the  verbal  music  which  is  its  vesture, 
— do  readers  recall  what  Mr  Swinburne  made  of  this 
same  measure  when  he  took  it  up  half  a  century  later 
in  the  Garden  of  Proserpine  ? 

But  in  attending  to  these  incidental  lyrics  we  risk 
losing  sight  of  what  was  Keats's  main  business  in  these 
weeks,  namely  the  bringing  to  a  close  his  eight  months' 
task  upon  Endymion.  In  finishing  the  poem  he  was  only 
a  little  behind  the  date  he  had  fixed  when  he  wrote  its 
opening  lines  at  Carisbrooke : — 

Many  and  many  a  verse  I  hope  to  write, 

Before  the  daisies,  vermeil  rimm'd  and  white. 

Hide  in  deep  herbage;  and  ere  yet  the  bees 

Hum  about  globes  of  clover  and  sweet  peas, 

I  must  be  near  the  middle  of  my  story. 

O  may  no  wintry  season,  bare  and  hoary, 

See  it  half  finished :   but  let  Autumn  bold,  ' 

With  universal  tinge  of  sober  gold. 

Be  all  about  me  when  I  make  an  end. 

The  gold  had  almost  all  fallen:  in  the  passage  in  which 
Keats  makes  Endymion  bid  what  he  supposes  to  be  his 
last  farewell  to  his  mortal  love  it  is  the  season  itself,  the 
season  and  the  autumnal  scene,  which  speak,  just  as 
they  spoke  in  the  ' drear-nighted  December'  lyric: — 

The  Carian 
No  word  retum'd:  both  lovelorn,  silent,  wan. 
Into  the  vallies  green  together  went. 
Far  wandering,  they  were  perforce  content 
To  sit  beneath  a  fair  lone  beechen  tree; 
Nor  at  each  other  gaz'd,  but  heavily 
Por*d  on  its  hazle  cirque  of  shedded  leaves. 

and  again: — 

At  this  he  pressed 
His  hands  against  his  face,  and  then  did  rest 
His  head  upon  a  mossy  hillock  green. 
And  so  remained  as  he  a  corpse  had  been 


162  AN  AUTUMNAL  CLOSE 

All  the  long  day;  save  when  he  scantly  lifted 

His  eyes  abroad,  to  see  how  shadows  shifted 

With  the  slow  move  of  time, — sluggish  and  weary 

Until  the  poplar  tops,  in  journey  dreary, 

Had  reached  the  river's  brim.     Then  up  he  rose. 

And  slowly  as  that  very  river  flows. 

Walked  towards  the  temple  grove  with  this  lament: 

*  Why  such  a  golden  eve  ?    The  breeze  is  sent 

Careful  and  soft,  that  not  a  leaf  may  fall 

Before  the  serene  father  of  them  all 

Bows  down  his  summer  head  below  the  west. 

Now  am  I  of  breath,  speech,  and  speed  possest, 

But  at  the  setting  I  must  bid  adieu 

To  her  for  the  last  time.     Night  will  strew 

On  the  damp  grass  myriads  of  lingering  leaves. 

And  with  them  shall  I  die;  nor  much  it  grieves 

To  die,  when  summer  dies  on  the  cold  sward.' 

That  point  about  making,  as  it  were,  a  dial-hand  of  a 
certain  group  of  poplars  with  their  moving  shadows 
would  have  a  special  local  interest  if  one  could  find  the 
place  which  suggested  it.  The  sun  sets  early  in  this 
valley  in  the  winter.  I  know  not  if  there  is  any  group 
of  trees  still  standing  that  could  be  watched  thus 
lengthening  out  its  afternoon  shadow  to  the  river's 
edge. 

Opposite  the  last  line  in  the  manuscript  of  Endymion 
Keats  wrote  the  date  November  28,  whence  it  would 
appear  that  it  had  taken  him  some  ten  days  at  most 
to  complete  the  required  five  hundred  lines.  He  did  not 
immediately  leave  Burf ord  Bridge,  but  stayed  on  through 
the  first  week  or  ten  days  of  December,  setting  to  work 
at  once,  it  would  appear,  on  the  revision  of  his  long 
poem,  and  composing,  we  know,  the  ^drear-nighted 
December'  lyric,  and  perhaps  one  or  two  others,  before 
he  returned  to  the  fraternal  lodgings  at  Hampstead. 
The  scheme  of  a  winter  flight  to  Lisbon  for  the  suffering 
Tom  had  been  given  up,  and  it  had  been  arranged  instead 
that  George  should  take  him  to  spend  some  months  at 
Teignmouth.  They  were  to  be  there  by  Christmas,  and 
Keats  timed  his  return  so  as  to  be  with  them  for  a  week 
or  two  at  Hampstead  before  they  started.    Endymion 


RETURN  TO  HAMPSTEAD  163 

was  not  published  until  the  following  April,  but  inasmuch 
as  with  its  completion  there  ends  the  first,  the  uncertain, 
experimental,  now  rapturously  and  now  despondently 
expectant  phase  of  Keats's  mind  and  art,  let  us  make 
this  our  opportunity  for  studying  it. 


^ 


CHAPTER  VI 

ENDYMION.—l.    THE  STORY:    ITS  SOURCES,  PLAN,  AND 
SYMBOLISM 

Invention  and  imagination — What  the  moon  meant  to  Keats — ^Elizabethan 
Precedents — Fletcher  and  Drayton — Drayton's  two  versions — Debt  of 
Keats  to  Drayton — Strain  of  allegory — The  Soul's  quest  for  beauty — 
Phantasmagoric  adventures — The  four  elements  theory — Its  error — 
Book  I.  The  exordium — The  forest  scene — Confession  to  Peona — Her 
expostulation — Endymion's  defence — The  ascending  scale — The  highest 
hope — Book  II.  The  praise  of  love — Underworld  marvels — The 
awakening  of  Adonis — Embraces  in  the  Jasmine  Bower — The  quest 
renewed — New  sympathies  awakened — Book  III,  Exordium — En- 
counter with  Glaucus — Glaucus  relates  his  doom — The  predestined 
deUverer — The  deUverance — Meaning  of  the  Parable — Its  machinery 
explained — The  happy  sequel — Book  IV.  Address  to  the  Muse — The 
Indian  damsel — An  ethereal  flight — Olympian  visions — Descent  and 
renunciation — Distressful  farewells — The  mystery  solved — A  chastened 
victory — Above  analysis  justified. 

Keats  had  long  been  in  love  with  the  Endymion  story. 
The  very  music  of  the  name,  he  avers,  had  gone  into 
his  being.  We  have  seen  how  in  the  poem  beginning 
^I  stood  tiptoe,'  finished  at  the  end  of  1816,  he  tried  a 
kind  of  prelude  or  induction  to  the  theme,  and  how, 
laying  this  aside,  he  determined  to  start  fresh  on  a 
^poetical  romance'  of  Endymion  on  a  great  scale. 
When  in  April  1817,  six  weeks  after  the  publication  of 
the  volume  of  Poems,  he  went  off  to  the  Isle  of  Wight 
to  get  firmly  to  work  on  his  new  task,  it  is  clear  that  he 
had  its  main  outlines  and  dimensions  settled  in  his  mind, 
but  nothing  more.  He  wrote  to  George  soon  after  his 
departure: — 

164 


INVENTION  AND  IMAGINATION         165 

As  to  what  you  say  about  my  being  a  Poet,  I  can  return  no 
Answer  but  by  saying  that  the  high  Idea  I  have  of  poetical  fame 
makes  me  think  I  see  it  towering  too  high  above  me.  At  any 
rate,  I  have  no  right  to  talk  until  Endymion  is  finished,  it  will 
be  a  test,  a  trial  of  my  Powers  of  Imagination,  and  chiefly  of 
my  invention  which  is  a  rare  thing  indeed — by  which  I  must 
make  4000  lines  of  one  bare  circumstance,  and  fill  them  with 
poetry — and  when  I  consider  that  this  is  a  great  task,  and  that 
when  done  it  will  take  me  but  a  dozen  paces  towards  the  temple 
of  fame — it  makes  me  say — God  forbid  that  I  should  be  without 
such  a  task!  I  have  heard  Hunt  say,  and  I  may  be  asked — 
why  endeavour  after  a  long  Poem?  To  which  I  should  answer. 
Do  not  the  Lovers  of  Poetry  like  to  have  a  little  Region  to  wander 
in,  where  they  may  pick  and  choose,  and  in  which  the  images 
are  so  numerous  that  many  are  forgotten  and  found  new  in  a 
second  Reading.  .  .  .  Besides,  a  long  Poem  is  a  test  of  invention, 
which  I  take  to  be  the  Polar  Star  of  Poetry,  as  Fancy  is  the  Sails 
— and  Imagination  the  rudder. — Did  our  great  Poets  ever  write 
Short  Pieces?  I  mean  in  the  shape  of  Tales.  This  same  inven- 
tion seems  indeed  of  late  years  to  have  been  forgotten  as  a  Poetical 
excellence — But  enough  of  this,  I  put  on  no  Laurels  till  I  shall 
have  finished  Endymiorij  and  I  hope  Apollo  is  not  angered  at  my 
having  made  a  Mockery  at  Hunt's — 


In  his  reiterated  insistence  on  Invention  and  Imagination  ^ 
as  the  prime  endowments  of  a  poet,  Keats  closely  echoes 
Joseph  Warton^s  protest  uttered  seventy  years  before: 
is  this  because  he  had  read  and  remembered  it,  or  only 
because  the  same  words  came  naturally  to  him  in 
pleading  the  same  cause?  When  his  task  was  finished 
he  confessed,  in  the  draft  of  a  preface  afterwards 
cancelled, — ^Before  I  began  I  had  no  inward  feel  of 
being  able  to  finish;  and  as  I  proceeded  my  steps 
were  all  uncertain.'  But  so  far  as  the  scale  of  the 
poem  was  concerned  he  adhered  almost  exactly  to 
his  original  purpose,  dividing  it  into  four  books  and 
finding  in  himself  resources  enough  to  draw  them  out, 
aU  except  the  first,  to  a  little  over  a  thousand  lines 
each. 

Throughout  Keats's  work,  the  sources  of  his  inspiration 
in  his  finest  passages  can  almost  always  be  recognized 
as  dual,  some  special  joy  in  the  delights  or  sympathy 


166  WHAT  THE  MOON  MEANT  TO  KEATS 

with  the  doings  of  nature  working  together  in  him  with 
some  special  stimulus  derived  from  books.  Of  such  a 
dual  kind  is  the  whole  inspiration  of  Endymion,  The 
poem  is  a  joint  outcome  of  his  intense,  his  abnormal 
susceptibility  to  the  spell  of  moonlight  and  of  his 
pleasure  in  the  ancient  myth  of  the  loves  of  the  moon- 
goddess  Cynthia  and  the  shepherd-prince  Endymion  ^ 
as  made  known  to  him  through  the  earlier  English 
poets. 

The  moon  was  to  Keats  a  power  very  different  from 
what  she  has  always  been  to  popular  astrology  and 
tradition.  Traditionally  and  popularly  she  was  the 
governess  of  floods,  the  presiding  planet  of  those  that 
ply  their  trade  by  sea,  river,  or  canal,  also  of  wanderers 
and  vagabonds  generally:  the  disturber  and  bewilderer 
withal  of  mortal  brains  and  faculties,  sending  down  upon 
men  under  her  sway  that  affliction  of  lunacy  whose  very 
name  was  derived  from  her.  For  Keats  it  was  her 
transmuting  and  glorifying  power  that  coimted,  not 
her  pallor  but  her  splendour,  the  magic  alchemy  exer- 
cised by  her  light  upon  the  things  of  earth,  the  heightened 
mystery,  poetry,  and  withal  unity  of  aspect  which  she 
sheds  upon  them.  He  can  never  keep  her  praises  long 
out  of  his  early  poetry,  and  we  have  seen,  in  '/  stood 
tip'toe/  what  a  range  of  beneficent  activities  he  attributes 


1  In  the  old  Grecian  world,  the  Endymion  myth,  or  rather  an  Endymion 
myth,  for  like  other  myths  it  had  divers  forms,  was  rooted  deeply  in  the 
popular  traditions  both  of  Elis  in  the  Peloponnese,  and  of  the  Ionian 
cities  about  the  Latmian  gulf  in  Caria.  The  central  feature  of  the  Carian 
legend  was  the  nightly  descent  of  the  moon-goddess  Sel6n6  to  kiss  her  lover, 
the  shepherd  prince  Endymion,  where  he  lay  spell-bound,  by  the  grace 
of  Zeus,  in  everlasting  sleep  and  everlasting  youth  on  Mount  Latmos. 
This  legend  was  early  crystallized  in  a  lyric  poem  of  Sappho  now  lost, 
and  thereafter  became  part  of  the  common  heritage  of  Greek  and  Roman 
popular  mythology.  The  separate  moon-goddess,  Selen^  for  the  Greeks 
and  Luna  for  the  Romans,  got  merged  in  course  of  time  in  the  multiform 
divinities  of  the  Greek  Artemis  and  the  Roman  Diana  respectively;  so 
that  in  modem  literatures  derived  from  the  Latin  it  is  always  of  Diana 
(or  what  is  the  same  thing,  of  Cynthia  or  Phoebe)  that  the  tale  is  told.  It 
is  not  given  at  length  in  any  of  our  extant  classical  writings,  but  only  by 
way  of  allusion  in  some  of  the  poets,  as  Theocritus,  ApoUonius  Rhodius, 
and  Ovid,  and  in  Cicero  and  some  of  the  late  Greek  prose-writers,  as  Lucian, 
Apollodorus,  and  Pausanias.  From  these  it  passed  at  the  Renaissance  into 
the  current  European  stock  of  classical  imagery  and  reference. 


ELIZABETHAN  PRECEDENTS  167 

to  her.  Now,  as  he  settles  down  to  work  on  EndymioUy 
we  shall  find  her,  by  reason  of  that  special  glorifying 
and  unifying  magic  of  her  light,  become  for  him,  at 
first  perhaps  instinctively  and  unaware,  but  more  and 
more  consciously  as  he  goes  on,  a  definite  sjniibol  of 
Beauty  itself — what  he  calls  in  a  letter  Hhe  principle 
of  Beauty  in  all  things,'  the  principle  which  binds  in 
a  divine  community  all  such  otherwise  imrelated  matters 
as  those  we  shall  find  him  naming  together  as  things  of 
beauty  in  the  exordium  of  his  poem.  Hence  the  tale  of 
the  loves  of  the  Greek  shepherd-prince  and  the  moon- 
goddess  turns  imder  his  hand  into  a  parable  of  the 
adventures  of  the  poetic  soul  striving  after  full  com- 
mimion  with  this  spirit  of  essential  Beauty. 

As  to  the  Hterary  associations  which  drew  Keats  to 
the  Endjnnion  story,  there  is  scarce  one  of  our  EHza- 
bethan  poets  but  touches  on  it  briefly  or  at  length. 
Keats  was  no  doubt  acquainted  with  the  Endimion  of 
John  Lyly,  an  allegorical  court  comedy  in  sprightly 
prose  which  had  been  among  the  plays  edited,  as  it 
happened,  by  one  of  his  new  Hampstead  friends, 
Charles  Dilke:  but  in  it  he  could  have  foimd  nothing 
to  his  purpose.  Marlowe  is  likely  to  have  been  in  his 
mind,  with 

— that  night-wandering,  pale,  and  watery  star. 
When  yawning  dragons  draw  her  thirling  car 
From  Latmus'  mount  up  to  the  gloomy  sky. 
Where,  crowned  with  blazing  light  and  majesty. 
She  proudly  sits. 

So  will  Shakespeare  have  been  certainly,  with  the 
call — 

Peace,  ho !  the  moon  sleeps  with  Endymion, 

And  would  not  be  awaked, 

uttered  by  Portia  at  the  close  of  the  most  enchanting 
moonHght  scene  in  all  literature.  Scarcely  less  famihar 
to  Keats  will  have  been  the  invocation  near  the  end  of 
Spenser's  Epithalamion,  or  the  reference  to  'pale- 
changeful   Cynthia'    and   her   Endymion   in   Browne's 


168  FLETCHER  AND  DRAYTON 

Britannia^ s  Pastorals;^  or  those  that  recur  once  and 
again  in  the  sonnets  of  Drummond  of  Hawthornden, 
or  those  he  would  have  remembered  from  the  masque 
in  the  Maid's  Tragedy  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  or 
in  translations  of  the  love-elegies  and  heroical  epistles 
of  Ovid.  But  the  two  EHzabethans,  I  think,  who  were 
chiefly  in  his  conscious  or  unconscious  recollection 
when  he  meditated  his  theme  are  Fletcher  and  Michael 
Drayton.  Here  is  the  fine  Endymion  passage,  delight- 
fully paraphased  from  Theocritus,  and  put  into  the 
mouth  of  the  wanton  Cloe,  by  Fletcher  in  the  Faithful 
Shepherdess,  that  tedious,  absurd,  exquisitely  written 
pastoral  of  which  the  measures  caught  and  charmed 
Keats's  ear  in  youth  as  they  had  caught  and  charmed 
the  ear  of  Milton  before  him. 

Shepherd,  I  pray  thee  stay,  where  hast  thou  been  ? 
Or  whither  go'st  thou  ?    Here  be  Woods  as  green 
As  any,  air  likewise  as  fresh  and  sweet. 
As  where  smooth  Zephyriis  plays  on  the  fleet 
Face  of  the  curled  Streams,  with  Flowers  as  many 
As  the  young  Spring  gives,  and  as  choise  as  any; 
Here  be  all  new  Delights,  cool  Streams  and  Wells, 
Arbors  o'rgrown  with  Woodbinds,  Caves,  and  Dells, 
Chuse  where  thou  wilt,  whilst  I  sit  by,  and  sing. 
Or  gather  Rushes  to  make  many  a  Ring 
For  thy  long  fingers;  tell  thee  tales  of  Love, 
How  the  pale  Phoebe  hunting  in  a  Grove, 
First  saw  the  Boy  Endymion,  from  whose  Eyes 
She  took  eternal  fire  that  never  dyes: 
How  she  convey'd  him  softly  in  a  sleep. 
His  temples  bound  with  poppy,  to  the  steep 
Head  of  old  Latmus,  where  she  stoops  each  night. 
Gilding  the  Mountain  with  her  Brothers  light. 
To  kiss  her  sweetest. 

In  regard  to  Drayton's  handling  of  the  story  there  is 
more  to  note.     In  early  life  he  wrote  a  poem  in  heroic 

*  In  another  place,  Browne  makes  Endymion  shut  out  from  the  favour 
of  Cynthia  stand  figuratively  for  Raleigh  in  disgrace  with  Elizabeth: 
just  as  in  Lyly's  comedy  the  myth  had  been  turned  into  an  allegory  of 
contemporary  court  intrigue,  with  Elizabeth  for  Cynthia,  Leicester  for 
Endjonion,  Tellus  for  Mary  Queen  of  Scots,  Eumenides  for  Sidney,  and 
so  forth. 


DRAYTON'S  TWO  VERSIONS  169 

couplets  called  Endimion  and  Phoebe,  This  he  never 
reprinted,  but  introduced  passages  from  it  into  a  later 
piece  in  the  same  metre  called  the  Man  in  the  Moone. 
The  volume  containing  Drayton^s  earlier  Endimion 
and  Phoebe  became  so  rare  that  when  Payne  Collier 
reprinted  it  in  1856  only  two  copies  were  known  to 
exist.  It  is  unlikely  that  Keats  should  have  seen  either 
of  these.  But  he  possessed  of  his  own  a  copy  of  Dray- 
ton's poems  in  Smethwick's  edition  of  1636  (one  of  the 
prettiest  of  seventeenth-century  books).  The  Man  in 
the  Moone  is  included  in  that  volume,  and  that  Keats 
was  familiar  with  it  is  evident.  In  it,  as  in  the  earher 
version,  but  with  a  difference,  the  poet,  having  enthroned 
his  shepherd-prince  beside  Cynthia  in  her  kingdom  of 
the  moon,  weaves  round  him  a  web  of  mystical  disqui- 
sition and  allegory,  in  which  popular  fancies  and 
superstitions  are  queerly  jumbled  up  with  the  then 
current  conceptions  of  the  science  of  astronomy  and 
the  traditions  of  mediaeval  theology  as  to  the  number 
and  order  of  the  celestial  hierarchies.  In  Drayton's 
earlier  poem  all  this  is  highly  serious  and  written  in  a 
rich  and  decorated  vein  of  poetry  intended,  it  might 
seem,  to  rival  Marlowe's  Hero  and  Leander:  in  his 
later,  where  the  tale  is  told  by  a  shepherd  to  his  mates 
at  the  feast  of  Pan,  the  narrator  lets  down  his  theme 
with  a  satiric  close  in  the  vein  of  Lucian,  recounting 
the  human  delinquencies  nightly  espied  by  Cynthia 
and  her  lover  from  their  sphere. 

The  particular  points  in  Keats's  Endymion  where  I 
seem  to  find  suggestions  from  Drayton's  Man  in  the 
Mocme  are  these.  First  the  idea  of  introducing  the 
story  with  the  feast  of  Pan, — ^but  as  against  this  it  may 
be  said  with  truth  that  feasts  of  Pan  are  stock  inci- 
dents in  Elizabethan  masques  and  pastorals  generally. 
Second,  his  sending  his  hero  on  journeys  beside  or  in 
pursuit  of  his  goddess  through  manifold  bewildering 
regions  of  the  earth  and  air:  for  this  antiquity  affords 
no  warrant,  and  the  hint  may  have  been  partly  due  to  the 
following  passage  in  Drayton  (which  is  also  interesting 


170    DEBT  OF  KEATS  TO  DRAYTON 

for  its  exceptionally  breathless  and  trailing  treatment 
of  the  verse): — 

Endymion  now  forsakes 
All  the  delights  that  shepherds  do  prefer. 
And  sets  his  mind  so  generally  on  her 
That,  all  neglected,  to  the  groves  and  springs,        ^ 
He  follows  Phoebe,  that  him  safely  brings 
(As  their  great  queen)  unto  the  nymphish  bowers. 
Where  in  clear  rivers  beautified  with  flowers 
The  silver  Naides  bathe  them  in  the  brack. 
Sometime  with  her  the  sea-horse  he  both  back. 
Amongst  the  blue  Nereides;  and  when. 
Weary  of  waters,  goddess-like  again 
She  the  high  mountains  actively  assays. 
And  there  amongst  the  light  Oriades, 
That  ride  the  swift  roes,  Phoebe  doth  resort; 
Sometimes  amongst  those  that  with  them  comport. 
The  Hamadriades,  doth  the  woods  frequent; 
And  there  she  stays  not;  but  incontinent 
Calls  down  the  dragons  that  her  chariot  draw, 
And  with  Endymion  pleased  that  she  saw, 
Mounteth  thereon,  in  twinkling  of  an  eye, 
Stripping  the  winds,  beholding  from  the  sky 
The  Earth  in  roundness  of  a  perfect  ball, — 

the  sequel  is  irrelevant,  and  the  passage  so  loose  in 
grammar  and  construction  that  it  matters  not  where 
it  is  broken  off. 

Thirdly,  we  have  the  curious  invention  of  the  magic 
robe  of  Glaucus  in  Keats^s  third  book.  In  it,  we  are 
told,  all  the  rulers  and  all  the  denizens  of  ocean  are 
figured  and  indued  with  magic  power  to  dwindle  and 
dilate  before  the  beholder's  eyes.  Keats  describes 
this  mystic  garment  in  a  dozen  lines  ^  which  can  scarcely 
be  other  than  a  summary  and  generalised  recollection 
of  a  long  passage  of  eighty  in  which  Drajiion  describes 
the  mantle  of  Cynthia  herself,  inwoven  with  figures  of 
sea  and  storm  and  shipwreck  and  sea-birds  and  of  men 
fishing  and  fowling  (crafts  supposed  to  be  subject  to 
the  planetary  influence  of  the  moon)  in  tidal  or  inland 
waters.     And  lastly,   Keats  in  his  second  book  has 

1  Endymion,  iii.  196-209. 


STRAIN  OF  ALLEGORY  171 

taken  a  manifest  hint  from  Drayton  where  he  makes 
Venus  say  archly  how  she  has  been  guessing  in  vain 
which  among  the  Olympian  goddesses  is  Endjonion's 
lover.  ^ 

Not  merely  by  delight  in  particular  poets  and  famili- 
arity with  favourite  passages,  but  by  rooted  instinct 
and  by  his  entire  self-training,  Keats  was  beyond  all 
his  contemporaries, — and  it  is  the  cardinal  fact  to  be 
borne  in  mind  about  him, — the  lineal  descendant  and 
direct  heir  of  the  EHzabethans.  The  spirit  of  EHzabethan 
poetry  was  bom  again  in  him  with  its  excesses  and 
defects  as  well  as  its  virtues.  One  general  characteristic 
of  this  poetry  is  its  prodigality  and  confusion  of  inci- 
dental, irrelevant,  and  superfluous  beauties,  its  lack, 
however  much  it  may  revel  in  classical  ideas  and 
associations,  of  the  classical  instinct  for  clarity,  sim- 
phcity,  and  selection.  Another  (I  speak  especially  of 
narrative  poetry)  is  its  habitual  wedding  of  allegory  and 
romance,  its  love  of  turning  into  parable  every  theme, 
other  than  mere  chronicle,  which  it  touches.  All  the 
masters  with  whom  Keats  w^as  at  this  time  most  famiHar 
— Spenser  of  course  first  and  foremost,  WiUiam  Browne 
and  practically  all  the  Spenserians, — ^were  men  apt  to 
conceive  alike  of  Grecian  myth  and  mediaeval  romance 
as  necessarily  holding  moral  and  symbolic  under-mean- 
ings  in  solution.  Again,  it  was  from  Ovid's  Meta- 
morphoses, as  Englished  by  that  excellent  Jacobean 
translator,  George  Sandys,  that  Keats,  more  than 
from  any  other  source,  made  himself  familiar  with  the 
details  of  classic  fable;  and  Sandys,  in  the  fine  Oxford 
foho  edition  of  his  book  which  we  know  Keats  used, 
must  needs  conform  to  a  fixed  mediaeval  and  Renaissance 
tradition  by  ^mythologizing'  his  text,  as  he  calls 
it,  with  a  commentary  fuU  not  only  of  illustrative 
parallel  passages  but  of  interpretations  half  rationalist, 
half  ethical,  which  Ovid  never  dreamt  of.  Neither 
must  it  be  forgotten  that  among  Keats's  own  contem- 
poraries Shelley  had  in  his  first  important  poem,  Alastor, 

1  Endymion,  ii.  569-572  and  908-916. 


172       THE  SOUL'S  QUEST  FOR  BEAUTY 

set  the  example  of  embarking  on  an  allegoric  theme, 
and  one  shadowing  forth,  as  we  shall  find  that  Endymion 
shadows  forth  though  on  different  lines,  the  adventures 
and  experiences  of  the  poetic  soul  in  man. 

The  bewildering  redundance  and  intricacy  of  detail 
in  Endymion  are  obvious,  the  presence  of  an  imder- 
lying  strain  of  allegoric  or  symboHc  meaning  harder  to 
detect.  Keats's  letters  referring  to  his  poem  contain 
only  the  sHghtest  and  rarest  hmts  of  the  presence  of 
such  ideas  in  it,  and  in  the  execution  they  are  so  little 
obtruded  or  even  made  clear  that  they  were  wholly 
missed  by  two  generations  of  his  earlier  readers.  It 
is  only  of  late  years  that  they  have  yielded  themselves, 
and  even  now  none  too  definitely,  to  the  scrutiny  of 
students  reading  and  re-reading  the  poem  by  the  light 
of  incidental  utterances  in  his  earlier  and  later  poetry 
and  in  his  miscellaneous  letters.  But  the  ideas  are 
certainly  there:  they  accoimt  for  and  give  interest 
to  much  that,  taken  as  mere  narrative,  is  confusing 
or  unpalatable:  and  the  best  way  of  finding  a  clue 
through  the  mazes  of  the  poem  is  by  lajdng  and  keeping 
hold  upon  them  wherever  we  can. 

For  such  a  clue  to  serve  the  reader,  he  must  have  it 
in  his  hand  from  the  beginning.     Let  it  be  borne  in 
mind,    then,    that    besides    the    fundamental    idea   of 
treating  the  passion   of  Endymion  for  Cynthia  as   a  ! 
type   of  the  passion   of  the  poetic   soul   for  essential^ 
Beauty,  Keats  wrote  under  the  influence  of  two  secondary  ^ 
moral  ideas-  or  convictions,   inchoate  probably  in  his 
mind  when  he  began  but  gaining  definiteness   as  he 
went  on.    One  was  that  the  soul  enamoured  of  and 
pursuing  Beauty  cannot  achieve  its  quest  in  selfishness 
and  isolation,  but  to  succeed  must  first  be  taken  out 
of  itself   and   purified   by   active   sympathy   with   the 
lives  and  sufferings  of  others:   the  other,  that  a  passion 
for  the  manifold  separate  and  dividual  beauties  of  things   l 
and    beings    upon    earth    is    in    its    nature    identical 
with  the  passion  for  that  transcendental  and  essential 
Beauty:     hence    the    various    hxmian    love-adventures^ 


PHANTASMAGORIC  ADVENTURES        173 

which  befall  the  hero  in  dreams  or  in  reahty,  and  seem 
to  distract  him  from  his  divine  quest,  are  shown  in  the 
end  to  be  in  truth  no  infidelities  but  only  attractions 
exercised  by  his  celestial  mistress  in  disguise. 

In  devising  the  adventures  of  his  hero  in  accordance 
with  these  leading  ideas,  Keats  works  in  part  from  his 
own  mental  experience.  He  weaves  into  his  tale,  in 
terms  always  of  concrete  imagery,  all  the  complex 
fluctuations  of  joy  and  despondency,  gleams  of  confident 
spiritual  illumination  alternating  with  faltering  hours 
of  darkness  and  self-doubt,-  which  he  had  himself  been 
undergoing  since  the  ambition  to  be  a  great  poet  seized 
him.  He  cannot  refrain  from  also  wea\dng  in  a  thousand 
and  one  irrelevant  matters  which  the  activity  and 
ferment  of  his  young  imagination  suggest,  thus  con- 
tinually confusing  the  main  current  of  his  narrative 
and  breaking  the  coherence  of  its  symbolism.  He 
draws  out  Hhe  one  bare  circumstance,'  to  use  his  own 
phrase,  of  the  story  into  an  endless  chain  of  intricate 
and  flowery  narrative,  leading  us  on  phantasmagoric 
joumeyings  under  the  bowels  of  the  earth  and  over 
the  floor  of  ocean  and  through  the  fields  of  air.  The 
scenery,  indeed,  is  often  not  merely  of  a  Gothic  vastness 
and  intricacy:  there  is  something  of  Oriental  bewilder- 
ment— an  Arabian  Night's  jugglery  mth  space  and 
time — in  the  vague  suddenness  with  which  its  changes 
are  effected. 

Critics  so  justly  esteemed  as  Mr  Robert  Bridges  and 
Professor  de  Selincourt  have  sought  a  key  to  the  organic 
structure  of  the  poem  in  the  supposition  that  each  of 
its  four  books  is  intended  to  relate  the  hero's  probationary 
adventures  in  one  of  the  four  elements,  the  first  book 
being  assigned  to  Earth,  the  second  to  Fire,  the  third 
to  Water,  the  fourth  to  Air.  I  am  convinced  that  this 
view  is  mistaken.  The  action  of  the  first  book  passes 
on  earth,  no  doubt,  and  that  of  the  second  beneath  the 
earth.  Now  it  is  true  that  according  to  ancient  behef 
there  existed  certain  subterranean  abodes  or  focuses 
of  fire, — the  stithy  of  Vulcan,  the  roots  of  Etna  where 


174        THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  THEORY 

the  giants  lay  writhing,  the  river  of  bale  rolling  in 
flames  around  the  city  of  the  damned.  But  such  things 
did  not  make  the  under-world,  as  the  theory  of  these 
critics  assumes,  the  recognised  region  of  the  element 
fire.  According  to  the  cosmology  fully  set  forth  by 
Ovid  at  the  beginning  of  his  first  book,  and  therefore 
thoroughly  familiar  to  Keats,  the  proper  region  or 
sphere  of  fire  was  placed  above  and  outside  that  of  air 
and  farthest  of  all  from  earth. ^  Not  only  had  Keats 
therefore  no  ancient  authority  for  thinking  of  the 
under-world  as  the  special  region  of  fire,  he  had  exphcit 
authority  to  the  contrary.  Moreover,  if  he  had  meant 
fire  he  would  have  given  us  fire,  whereas  in  his  under- 
world there  is  never  a  gleam  of  it,  not  a  flicker  of  the 
flames  of  Phlegethon  nor  so  much  as  a  spark  from  the 
anvil  of  Vulcan;  but  instead,  endless  shadowy  temple 
corridors,  magical  cascades  spouting  among  prodigious 
precipices,  and  the  gardens  and  bower  of  Adonis  in 
their  spring  herbage  and  freshness.  It  is  true,  again, 
that  the  third  book  takes  us  and  keeps  us  under  sea. 
But  the  reason  is  the  general  one  that  Endymion, 
typifying  the  poetic  soul  of  man  in  love  with  the  principle 
of  essential  Beauty,  has  to  leave  habitual  things  behind 
him  and 

wander  far 

In  other  regions,  past  the  scanty  bar 

To  mortal  steps, 

in  order  to  learn  secrets  of  life,  death,  and  destiny 
necessary  to  his  enlightenment  and  discipline.  Where 
else  should  he  learn  such  secrets  if  not  in  the  mysterious 
hollows  of  the  earth  and  on  the  untrodden  floor  of 
ocean?  ^Our  friend  Keats, ^  Endymion  is  made  to  say 
in  one  of  the  poet's  letters  from   Oxford,   'has  been 

1  Meiam.  i.  26-31,  Englished  thus  by  Sandys: — 

Forthwith  upsprung  the  c[uick  and  weightless  Fire, 
Whose  flames  unto  the  highest  Arch  aspire: 
The  next,  in  levity  and  peace,  is  Air: 
Gross  elements  to  thicker  Earth  repair 
Self-clogg'd  with  weight :  the  Waters  flowing  round 
Possess  the  last,  and  sohd  Tellus  bound. 


rv. 


ITS  ERROR  175 

hauling  me  through  the  earth  and  sea  with  unrelenting 
perseverance  \*  and  in  like  manner  in  the  poem  itself 
the  hero  asks, 

Why  am  I  not  as  are  the  dead, 
Since  to  a  woe  like  this  I  have  been  led 
Through  the  dark  earth,  and  through  the  wondrous  sea? 

But  never  a  word  to  suggest  any  thought  of  the  element 
fire — an  element  from  which  Keats's  too  often  fevered 
spirit  seems  even  to  have  shrunk,  for  except  in  telling 
of  the  blazing  omens  of  Hyperion^s  downfall  it  is  scarce 
mentioned  in  his  poetry  at  all.  Lastly,  it  is  again  true 
that  in  the  foiui^h  book  Endymion  and  his  earthly  love 
are  carried  by  winged  horses  on  an  ethereal  excursion 
among  the  stars  (though  only  for  two  hundred  and 
seventy  lines  out  of  a  thousand,  the  rest  of  the  action 
passing,  like  that  of  the  first  book,  on  the  soil  of  Caria). 
But  this  flight  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  element  air 
as  such;  it  is  the  flight  of  the  soul  on  the  coursers  of 
imagination  through  a  region  of  dreams  and  visions 
destined  afterwards  to  come  true.  Hints  for  such 
submarine  and  ethereal  wanderings  will  no  doubt  have 
come  into  Keats's  mind  from  various  sources  in  his 
reading, — from  the  passage  of  Drayton  above  quoted, — 
from  the  Arabian  Nights, — it  may  be  from  like  incidents 
in  the  mediaeval  Alexander  romances  (in  which  the 
hero's  crowning  exploits  are  always  a  flight  to  heaven 
on  a  griffin  and  a  plunge  under-sea  in  a  glass  case),  or 
possibly  even  from  the  Endimion  of  Gombauld,  a  very 
wild  and  withal  tiresome  French  seventeenth-century 
prose  romance  on  Keats's  own  theme. ^ 
Book  I.     This  book  is  entirely  introductory,  and 

1  Keats  was  more  widely  read  in  out-of-the-way  French  literature  than 
could  have  been  expected  from  his  opportunities,  and  there  are  passages 
in  Endymion  which  run  closely  parallel  to  Gombauld's  romance,  notably 
the  first  apparition  of  Cynthia,  with  the  description  of  her  hair  (End.  I, 
605-618),  and  the  account  of  the  sudden  distaste  which  afterwards  seizes 
him  for  former  pleasures  and  companions.  But  these  may  be  mere  coin- 
cidences, and  the  whole  series  of  the  hero's  subsequent  adventures  according 
to  Gombauld,  his  dream-flight  to  the  Caspian  under  the  spell  of  the  Thes- 
salian  enchantress  Ismene,  and  all  the  weird  things  that  befall  him  there, 
are  entirely  unlike  anything  that  happens  in  Keats's  poem. 


v^ 


176  BOOK  I.    THE  EXORDIUM 

carries  us  no  farther  than  the  exposition  by  the  hero 
of  the  trouble  in  which  he  finds  himself.  For  its  exordium 
Keats  uses  a  line,  and  probably  a  whole  passage,  which 
he  had  written  many  months  before  and  kept  by  him. 
One  day  in  1816,  while  he  was  still  walking  the  hospitals 
and  sharing  rooms  in  St  Thomas's  Street  with  his 
fellow-students  Mackereth  and  Henry  Stephens,  Keats 
called  out  to  Stephens  from  his  window-seat  to  listen 
to  a  new  line  he  had  just  written, — ^A  thing  of  beauty 
is  a  constant  joy,' — and  asked  him  how  he  liked  it. 
Stephens  indicating  that  he  was  not  quite  satisfied, 
Keats  thought  again  and  came  out  with  the  amended 
line,  now  familiar  and  proverbial  even  to  triteness, 
'A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever.'  ^  Using  this  for 
the  first  line  of  his  new  poem,  Keats  runs  on  from  it 
into  a  passage,  which  may  or  may  not  have  been  written 
at  the  same  time,  declaring  the  virtues  of  those  things 
of  beauty — sun,  moon,  trees,  rivulets,  flowers,  tales  of 


*  The  authority  for  this  story  is  the  late  Sir  B.  W.  Richardson,  professing 
to  quote  verbatim  as  follows  from  Mr  Stephens'  own  statement  to  him  in 
conversation. 

'One  evening  in  the  twiUght,  the  two  students  sitting  together,  Stephens 
at  his  medical  studies,  Keats  at  his  dreaming,  Keats  breaks  out  to  Stephens 
that  he  has  composed  a  new  hne: — 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  constant  joy. 

"What  think  you  of  that,  Stephens?"  "It  has  the  true  ring,  but  is 
wanting  in  some  way,"  replies  the  latter,  as  he  dips  once  more  into  his 
medical  studies.    An  interval  of  silence,  and  again  the  poet: — 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever. 

"What  think  you  of  that,  Stephens?"  "That  it  will  live  for  ever."' 
The  conversation  as  thus  related  at  second  hand  reads  certainly  as 
thou^  it  had  been  more  or  less  dressed  up  for  efifect,  but  we  cannot  suppose 
the  circumstance  to  have  been  wholly  invented.  A  careful  reading  of  the 
first  twenty-four  lines  of  Endymion  will  show  that  they  have  close  affinities 
with  much  both  in  SUep  and  Poetry  and  'I  stood  tip-toe'  in  thought  as  well 
as  style,  and  especially  in  their  manner  of  bringing  together,  by  reason  of 
the  common  property  of  beauty,  things  otherwise  so  unlike  as  the  cloak 
of  weeds  which  rivulets  are  conceived  as  making  to  keep  themselves  cool 
in  summertime  (compare  'I  stood  tip-toe'  11. 80-84)  musk-roses  in  a  woodland 
brake  (compare  Sleep  and  Poetry  1.  5),  the  hfe  of  great  spirits  after  death, 
and  beautiful  stories  in  general.  My  own  inference  is  that  Keats,  having 
written  these  two  dozen  lines  some  time  in  1816.  used  them  the  next 
spring  as  a  suitable  exordium  for  Endymion,  and  added  the  following 
Imes,  25-33,  as  a  (somewhat  clumsy)  transition  to  the  actual  beginning 
of  the  poem  'Therefore  with  full  happiness,'  etc.,  as  written  at  Carisbrooke. 


THE  FOREST  SCENE  177 

beauty  and  heroism  indiscriminately — ^which  make  for 
health  and  quietude  amidst  the  gloom  and  distemper 
of  the  world.  Then  he  tells  of  his  own  happiness  in 
setting  about  his  cherished  task  in  the  prime  of  spring, 
and  his  hopes  of  finishing  it  before  winter.  He  takes 
us  to  a  Pan-haunted  forest  on  Mount  Latmos,  with  many 
paths  leading  to  an  open  glade.  The  hour  is  dawn,  the 
scene  in  part  manifestly  modelled  on  a  similar  one  in 
the  Chaucerian  poem.  The  Floure  and  Lefe,  in  which  he 
took  so  much  pleasure.  First  a  group  of  little  children 
come  in  from  the  forest  paths  and  gather  round 
the  altar,  then  a  bevy  of  damsels,  then  a  company 
of  shepherds;  priests  and  people  follow,  and  last  of 
all  the  young  shepherd-prince  and  hero  Endymion, 
now  wan  and  pining  from  a  new,  unexplained  soul- 
sickness. 

The  festival  opens  with  a  speech  of  thanksgiving  and 
exhortation  from  the  priest,  followed  by  a  choral  Yvyian 
in  honour  of  the  god:  then  come  dances  and  games 
and  story-telling.  Meantime  Endymion  and  the  priest 
sit  apart  among  the  elder  shepherds,  who  pass  the  time 
jroagimng  what  happy  tasks  and  ministrations  it  will 
Jpe  theirs  jo  ply  in  their  ^  homes  ethereaP  after  death. 
In  the  midst  of  such  conversation  Endymion  goes  off 
into  a  distressful  trance,  during  which  there  comes  to 
him  his  sister  Peona  (this  personage  and  her  name  are 
inventions  of  Keats,  the  name  perhaps  suggested  by 
that  of  Paeana  in  the  fourth  book  of  the  Faerie  Queene, 
or  by  the  Paeon  mentioned  in  Lempriere  as  a  son  of 
Endymion  in  the  Elean  version  of  the  tale,  or  by  Paeon 
the  physician  of  the  gods  in  the  Iliadj  whom  she  resembles 
in  her  quality  of  healer  and  comforter;  or  very  probably 
by  all  three  together).  Peona  wakes  her  brother  from 
his  trance,  and  takes  him  in  a  shallop  to  an  arbour  of 
her  own  on  a  Httle  island  in  a  lake.  Here  she  lulls  him 
to  rest,  the  poet  first  pausing  to  utter  a  fine  invocation 
to  Sleep — ^his  second,  the  first  having  been  at  the 
beginning  of  Sleef  and  Poetry.  Endymion  awakens 
refreshed,  and  promises  to  be  of  better  cheer  in  future. 


178  CONFESSION  TO  PEONA 

She  sings  soothingly  to  the  lute,  and  then  questions 
him  concerning  his  troubles: — 

Brother,  'tis  vain  to  hide 
That  thou  dost  know  of  things  mysterious, 
Immortal,  starry;  such  alone  could  thus 
Weigh  down  thy  nature. 

When  she  has  guessed  in  vain,  he  determines  to  confide 
in  her:  tells  her  how  he  fell  asleep  on  a  bed  of  poppies 
and  other  flowers  which  he  had  found  magically  new- 
blown  on  a  place  where  there  had  been  none  before; 
how  he  dreamed  that  he  was  gazing  fixedly  at  the  stars 
shining  in  the  zenith  with  preternatural  glory,  until 
they  began  to  swim  and  fade,  and  then,  dropping  his 
eyes  to  the  horizon,  he  saw  the  moon  in  equal  glory 
emerging  from  the  clouds;  how  on  her  disappearance 
he  again  looked  up  and  there  came  down  to  him  a  female 
apparition  of  incomparable  beauty  (in  whom  it  does 
not  yet  occur  to  him  to  recognize  the  moon-goddess); 
how  she  took  him  by  the  hand,  and  they  were  lifted 
together  through  mystic  altitudes 

Where  falling  stars  dart  their  artillery  forth 
And  eagles  struggle  with  the  buffeting  north 
That  balances  the  heavy  meteor  stone; 

how  thence  they  swooped  downwards  in  eddies  of  the 
mountain  wind,  and  finally  how,  clinging  to  and  em- 
bracing his  willing  companion  in  a  delirium  of  happiness, 
he  alighted  beside  her  on  a  flowery  alp,  and  there  fell 
into  a  dream-sleep  within  his  sleep;  from  which  awaken- 
ing to  reality,  he  found  himself  alone  on  the  bed  of 
poppies,  with  the  breeze  at  intervals  bringing  him 
Taint  fare-thee-wells  and  sigh-shrilled  adieus,'  and 
with  disenchantment  fallen  upon  everything  about 
him: — 

All  the  pleasant  hues 
Of  heaven  and  earth  had  faded :  deepest  shades 
Were  deepest  dungeons:  heaths  and  sunny  shades 
Were  full  of  pestilent  light;  and  taintless  rills 
Seem'd  sooty,  and  o'erspread  with  upturned  gills 


HER  EXPOSTULATION  179 

Of  dying  fish;  the  vermeil  rose  had  blown 
In  frightful  scarlet,  and  its  thorns  outgrown 
Like  spiked  aloe. 

Here  we  have  the  first  of  those  mystic  dream-flights 
of  Endymion  and  his  celestial  visitant  in  company, 
prefiguring  the  union  of  the  soul  with  the  spirit  of 
essential  Beauty,  which  have  to  come  true  before  the 
end  but  of  which  the  immediate  result  is  that  all  other . 
dehghts  lose  their  savour  and  turn  to  ashes.  T,he  spixit  / 
of  man,  so  the  interpretation  would  seem  to  run,  haying  i 
onc^  caught  the  vision  of  transcendental  Beauty  and 
been  allowed  to  embrace  it^  must  pine  after  it  evermore 
and'ThTts  absence  can  take  no  delight  in  nature  or 
mankind.  Another  way  would  have  been  to  make  his 
"hero  find  in  every  such  momentary  vision  or  revelation 
a  fresh  encouragement,  a  source  of  joy  and  inspiration 
imtil  the  next:  but  this  was  not  Keats's  way.  Peona 
listens  with  sisterly  sympathy,  but  her  powers  of  help, 
being  purely  human,  cannot  in  this  case  avail.  She 
can  only  try  to  rouse  him  by  contrasting  his  present 
forlorn  and  languid  state  with  his  former  virility  and 
ambition: — 

Yet  it  is  strange  and  sad,  alas ! 
That  one  who  through  this  middle  earth  should  pass 
Most  like  a  sojourning  demi-god,  and  leave 
His  name  upon  the  harp-string,  should  achieve 
No  higher  bard  than  simple  maidenhood. 
Sighing  alone,  and  fearfully, — ^how  the  blood 
Left  his  young  cheek;  and  how  he  used  to  stray 
He  knew  not  where;  and  how  he  would  say.  Nay, 
If  any  said  'twas  love:  and  yet  'twas  love; 
What  could  it  be  but  love  ?    How  a  ring-dove 
Let  fall  a  sprig  of  yew-tree  in  his  path; 
And  how  he  died:  and  then,  that  love  doth  scathe 
The  gentle  heart,  as  Northern  blasts  do  roses. 
And  then  the  ballad  of  his  sad  life  closes 
With  sighs,  and  an  alas !    Endymion  I 

His  reply  in  his  own  defence  is  long  and  much  of  it 
beautiful:  but  we  follow  the  chain  of  thought  and  argu- 
ment with  difficulty,  so  hidden  is  it  in  flowers  of  poetry 


v^ 


180  ENDYMION'S  DEFENCE 

and  so  little  are  its  vital  links  made  obvious.  A  letter  of 
Keats,  containing  one  of  his  very  few  explanatory  com- 
ments on  work  of  his  own,  shows  that  he  attached  great 
importance  to  the  passage  and  felt  that  its  sequence 
and  significance  might  easily  be  missed.  Sending  a 
correction  of  the  proof  to  Mr  Taylor,  the  publisher, 
he  says — ^The  whole  thing  must,  I  think,  have  appeared 
to  you,  who  are  a  consecutive  man,  as  a  thing  almost 
of  mere  words,  but  I  assure  you  that  when  I  wrote  it, 
it  was  a  regular  stepping  of  the  Imagination  towards 
a  ^ruth.  My  having  written  that  argument  will  perhaps 
be  ofThe  greatest  service  to  me  of  anything  I  ever  did. 
It  set  before  me  the  gradations  of  happiness,  even  like 
a  kind  of  pleasure  thermometer,  and  is  my  first  step 
towards  the  chief  attempt  in  the  drama.'  The  first  ten 
lines  offer  little  difliculty: — 

Peona !  ever  have  I  long'd  to  slake 
My  thirst  for  the  world's  praises:  nothing  base. 
No  merely  slumberous  phantasm,  could  unlace 
The  stubborn  canvas  for  my  voyage  prepared — 
Though  now  'tis  tatter'd;  leaving  my  bark  bar'd 
And  sullenly  drifting:  yet  my  higher  hope 
Is  of  too  wide,  too  rainbow-large  a  scope. 
To  fret  at  myriads  of  earthly  wrecks. 
Wherein  lies  happiness  ?     In  that  which  becks 
Our  ready  minds  to  fellowship  divine, 
A  fellowship  with  essence;  till  we  shine, 
Full  alchemized,  and  free  of  space.     Behold 
The  clear  religion  of  heaven ! 

It  seems  clear  that  we  have  here  shadowed  forth  the 
highest  hope  and  craving  of  the  poetic  soul,  the  hope 
to  be  wedded  in  fuU  communion  or  ^fellowship  divine' 
— or  shall  we  say  with  Wordsworth  in  love  and  holy 
passion? — ^with  the  spirit  of  essential  Beauty  in  the 
world.  In  the  next  lines  we  shall  find,  if  we  read  them 
carefully  enough,  that  Keats,  having  thus  defined  his 
ultimate  hope,  breaks  off  and  sets  out  again  from  the 
foot  of  a  new  ascending  scale  of  poetical  pleasure  and 
endeavour  which  he  asks  us  to  consider.  It  differs 
from  the  ascending  scale  of  the  earlier  poems  inasmuch 


THE  ASCENDING  SCALE  181 

as  it  begins,  not  with  the  to)dng  of  nymphs  in  shady 
places  and  the  Hke,  but  with  thoughts  of  olden  min- 
strelsy and  romantic  tales  and  prophecies.  The  verse 
here  is  of  Keats's  finest : — 

— ^hist,  when  the  airy  stress 
Of  music's  kiss  impregnates  the  free  Winds, 
And  with  a  sympathetic  touch  unbinds 
-^olian  magic  from  their  lucid  wombs:  . 
Then  old  songs  waken  from  enclouded  tombs; 
Old  ditties  sigh  above  their  father^s  grave; 
Ghosts  of  melodious  prophecyings  rave 
Round  every  spot  where  trod  Apollo's  foot; 
Bronze  clarions  awake,  and  faintly  bruit. 
Where  long  ago  a  giant  battle  was; 
And,  from  the  turf,  a  lullaby  doth  pass 
In  every  place  where  infant  Orpheus  slept. 

It  is  impressed  upon  us  in  the  next  lines  that  this  is 
a  relatively  unexalted  phase  of  imaginative  feeling, 
and  our  thoughts  are  directed  to  other  experiences  of 
the  poetic  soul  more  enthralling  and  more  ^self-destroy- 
ing' (that  is  more  effectual  in  purging  it  of  egotism), 
namely  the  experiences  of  friendship  and  love,  those 
of  love  above  all : — 

Aye,  so  delicious  is  the  unsating  food. 

That  men,  who  might  have  tower'd  in  the  van 

Of  all  the  congregated  world,  to  fan 

And  winnow  from  the  coming  step  of  time 

All  chaff  of  custom,  wipe  away  all  slime 

Left  by  men-slugs  and  human  serpentry. 

Have  been  content  to  let  occasion  die, 

Whilst  they  did  sleep  in  love's  elysium. 

And,  truly,  I  would  rather  be  struck  dumb. 

Than  speak  against  this  ardent  listlessness : 

For  I  have  ever  thought  that  it  might  bless 

The  world  with  benefits  unknowingly; 

As  does  the  nightingale,  upperched  high. 

And  cloister'd  among  cool  and  bunched  leaves — 

She  sings  but  to  her  love,  nor  e'er  conceives 

How  tiptoe  Night  holds  back  her  dark-grey  hood. 

If  a  man,  next  pleads  Endymion,  may  thus  reasonably 
give  up  even  the  noblest  of  worldly  ambitions  for  the 


\1 


182  THE  HIGHEST  HOPE 

joys  of  a  merely  mortal  love,  how  much  more  may  he 
do  so  for  those  of  an  immortal.  No,  he  re-assures  Peona 
in  reply  to  her  questioning  glance,  he  is  not  fancy- 
sick: — 

no,  no,  I'm  sure  ) 

My  restless  spirit  never  could  endure  ^ 

To  brood  so  long  upon  one  luxury. 
Unless  it  did,  though  fearfully,  espy 
A  hope  beyond  the  shadow  of  a  dream. 

/      We  have  now  been  carried  back  to  the  top  of  the  scale, 

/  and  these  lines  again  express,   although  vaguely,  the 

\   aspirations  of  the  poetic  soul  at  their  highest  pitch, 

\  rising  through  thoughts  and  experiences  of  mortal  love 

to  the  hope  of  commimion  with  immortal  Beauty.    But 

Ithat  longed-for,  loftiest  phase  of  the  imaginative  life, 

[that  hope  beyond  the  shadow  of  a  dream,  too  vast 

(and  too  rainbow-bright  to  be  quenched  by  any  fear  of 

/  earthly  disaster,  Endymion  cannot  attempt  to  define, 

'  least  of  aU  to  the  practically-minded  Peona.    He  can 

only  try  to  convince  her  of  its  reahty  by  telling  her  of 

later  momentary   visitations   with   which   the   divinity 

of  his  dreams  has  favoured  him — ^her  face  reflected  at 

him  from  a  spring — her  voice  murmuring  to  him  from 

a   cave — and  how  miserably  in   the  intervals  he  has 

pined  and  himgered  for  her.    But  now,   he  ends  by 

assuring  his  sister,  he  will  be  patient  and  pine  no  longer. 

Yet  it  is  but  a  sickly  half-assurance  after  all. 

There  is  a  paly  flame  of  hope  that  plays 
Where'er  I  look:  but  yet,  TU  say  'tis  naught. 
And  here  I  bid  it  die.     Have  I  not  caught. 
Already,  a  more  healthy  countenance  ? 

And  with  this,  as  she  rows  him  back  from  her  island, 
the  anxious  sister  must  rest  content. 

Book  II.  opens  with  a  renewed  declamation  on  the 
power  and  glory  of  love,  and  the  relative  unimportance 
of  the  wars  and  catastrophes  of  history.  Juliet  leaning 
from  her  balcony,  the  swoon  of  Imogen,  Hero  wrong- 
fully accused  by  Claudio,  Spenser's  Pastorella  among 
the  bandits,  he  declares. 


BOOK  11.     THE  PRAISE  OF  LOVE        183 

Are  things  to  brood  on  with  more  ardency 
Than  the  death-day  of  empires. 

The  passage  has  caused  some  critics  to  reproach  Keats 
as  a  mere  mawkish  amorist  indifferent  to  the  great  affairs 
and  interests  of  the  world.  But  must  one  not  beHeve 
that  all  poor  flawed  and  fragmentary  human  loves,  real 
or  fabled,  happy  or  miserable,  are  far  off  symbols  and 
shadowings  of  that  Love  which,  unless  the  universe 
is  quite  other  than  we  have  trusted,  ^  moves  the  sun 
and  the  other  stars'?  Are  they  not  related  to  it  as  to 
their  source  and  spring?  It  is  quite  true  that  Keats 
was  not  yet  able  to  tell  of  such  loves  except  in  terms 
which  you  may  caU  mawkish  if  you  will  (he  called  them 
so  himself  a  Httle  later).  But  being  a  poet  he  knew^  well 
enough  their  worth  and  parentage.  And  when  the 
future  looks  back  on  today,  even  on  today,  a  death- 
day  of  empires  in  a  sterner  and  vaster  sense  than  any 
the  world  has  known,  will  all  the  waste  and  hatred  and 
horror,  all  the  hope  and  heroism  of  the  time,  its  tremen- 
dous issues  and  catastrophes,  be  really  found  to  have 
eclipsed  and  superseded  love  as  the  thing  fittest  to  fill 
the  soul  and  inspire  the  songs  of  a  poet  ? 

The  invocation  ended,  we  set  out  with  the  hero  on 
the  adventures  that  await  him.  He  gathers  a  wild-rose 
bud  which  on  expanding  releases  a  butterfly  from  its 
heart:  the  butterfly  takes  wing  and  he  follows  its 
flight  with  eagerness.  At  last  they  reach  a  fountain 
spouting  near  the  mouth  of  a  cave,  and  in  touching 
the  water  the  butterfly  is  suddenly  transformed  into 
a  nymph  of  the  fountain,  who  speaking  to  Endymion 
pities,  encourages,  and  warns  him  in  one  breath. 
Endymion  sits  and  soliloquizes  beside  the  fountain, 
at  first  in  wavering  terms  which  express  the  ebb  and 
flow  of  Keats's  own  inner  aspirations  and  misgivings 
about  his  poetic  calling.  Anon  he  invokes  the  virgin 
goddess  Cynthia  to  quell  the  tyranny  of  love  in  him 
(not  yet  guessing  that  his  dream  visitant  is  really  she). 
But  no,  insensibiHty  would  be  the  worst  of  all;  the 
goddess  must,  he  is  assured,  know  of  some  form  of  love 


184  UNDERWORLD  MARVELS 

higher  and  purer  than  the  Cupids  are  concerned  with; 
he  prays  to  her  to  be  propitious;  dreams  again  that  he 
is  sailing  through  the  sky  with  her;  and  makes  a  wild 
appeal  to  her  which  is  answered  by  a  voice  from  within 
the  cavern  bidding  him  descend  4nto  the  sparry  hollows 
of  the  world/  He  obeys,  (this  plunge  into  a  spring  or 
fountain  and  thence  into  the  under-world  is  a  regular 
incident  in  a  whole  group  of  folk  tales,  one  or  another 
of  which  was  no  doubt  in  Keats's  mind) :  and  we  follow 
him  at  first  into  a  region 

nor  bright,  nor  sombre  wholly, 
J5ut  mingled  up;  a  gleaming  melancholy; 
ly^  A  dusky  empire  and  its  diadems; 
One  faint  eternal  eventide  of  gems. 

A  vein  of  gold  sparkling  with  jewels  serves  him  for 
path,  and  leads  him  through  twilight  vaults  and  passages 
to  a  ridge  that  towers  over  many  waterfalls:  and  the 
lustre  of  a  pendant  diamond  guides  him  further  till  he 
reaches  a  temple  of  Diana.  What  imaginative  youth 
but  has  known  his  passive  day-dreams  haunted  by 
visions,  mysteriously  impressive  and  alluring,  of  natural 
and  architectural  marvels,  huge  sculptured  caverns  and 
gHmmering  palace-halls  in  endless  vista?  To  such 
imaginings,  fed  by  his  readings  and  dreamings  on 

Memphis,  and  Nineveh,  and  Babylon, 
Keats  in  this  book  lets  himseK  go  without  a  check. 
Now  we  find  ourselves  in  a  temple,  described  as  com- 
plete and  true  to  sacred  custom,  with  an  image  of 
Diana;  and  in  a  trice  either  we  have  passed,  or  the 
temple  itseK  has  dissolved,  into  a  structure  which  by 
its  ^abysmal  depths  of  awe,'  its  gloomy  splendours 
and  intricacies  of  aisle  and  vault  and  corridor,  its  dimly 
gorgeous  and  most  un-Grecian  magnificence,  reminds 
us  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  Vathek  and  the  halls  of 
Eblis  or  some  of  the  magical  subterranean  palaces  of 
the  Arabian  Nights.  (Beckford's  Vathek  and  the 
Thousand  and  One  Nights  were  both  among  Keats's 
famihar  reading.)  Endymioii  is  miserable  there,  sxid 
appeals  to  Diana  to  restore  him  to  the  pleasant  light  of 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  ADONIS  185 

eaxth.  Thereupon  the  marble  floor  breaks  up  beneath 
and  before  his  footsteps  into  a  flowery  sward.  Endymion 
walks  on  to  the  sound  of  a  soft  music  which  only  intensi- 
fies his  yearnings:  is  led  by  a  light  through  the  alleys 
of  a  myrtle  grove;  and  comes  to  an  embowered  chamber 
where  Adonis  lies  asleep  among  Httle  ministering  Loves, 
with  Cupid  himself,  lute  in  hand,  for  their  chief. 

Here  foUows  a  long  and  highly  wrought  episode  of 
the  winter  sleep  of  Adonis  and  the  descent  of  Venus  to 
awaken  him.  The  original  idea  for  the  scene  comes 
from  Ovid,  in  part  direct,  in  part  through  Spenser 
{Faerie  Queene,  iii,  6)  and  Shakespeare.  But  the  detail 
is  entirely  Keats's  own  and  on  the  whole  is  a  happy 
example  of  his  early  luxuriant  manner;  especially 
the  description  of  the  entrance  of  Venus  and  the  looks 
and  presence  of  Cupid  as  bystander  and  interpreter. 
The  symbolic  meaning  of  the  story  is  for  him  evidently 
much  the  same  as  it  was  to  the  ancients, — the  awaken- 
ing of  nature  to  love  and  life  after  the  sleep  of  winter, 
with  all  the  ulterior  and  associated  hopes  implied  by  such 
a  resurrection.  The  first  embracements  over,  Endymion 
is  about  to  intreat  the  favour  of  Venus  for  his  quest 
when  she  anticipates  him  encouragingly,  telling  him 
that  from  her  upper  regions  she  has  perceived  his  plight 
and  has  guessed  (here  is  one  of  the  echoes  from  Drayton 
to  which  I  have  referred  above)  that  some  goddess,  she 
knows  not  which,  has  condescended  to  him.  She  bids 
her  son  be  propitious  to  him,  and  she  and  Adonis  depart. 
Endymion  wanders  on  by  miraculous  grottoes  and 
palaces,  and  then  mounts  by  a  diamond  balustrade, 

Leading  afar  past  wild  magnificence. 
Spiral  through  ruggedst  loopholes,  and  thence 
Stretching  across  a  void,  then  guiding  o'er 
Enormous  chasms,  where,  all  foam  and  roar. 
Streams  subterranean  teaze  their  granite  beds; 
Then  heightened  just  above  the  silvery  heads 
Of  a  thousand  fountains,  so  that  he  could  dash 
The  waters  with  his  spear;  but  at  the  splash. 
Done  heedlessly,  those  spouting  columns  rose 
Sudden  a  poplar's  height,  and  'gan  to  enclose 


186  EMBRACES  IN  THE  JASMINE  BOWER 

His  diamond  path  with  fretwork,  streaming  round 
AHve,  and  dazzHng  cool,  and  with  a  sound. 
Haply,  like  dolphin  tumults,  when  sweet  shells 
Welcome  the  float  of  Thetis. 

The  fountains  assume  all  manner  of  changing  and 
interlacing  imitative  shapes  which  he  watches  with 
delight  (this  and  much  else  on  the  underground  journey 
seems  to  be  the  outcome  of  pure  fancy  and  day-dreaming 
on  the  poet's  part,  without  symbolic  purpose).  Then 
passing  on  through  a  dim  tremendous  region  of  vaults 
and  precipices  he  has  a  momentary  vision  of  the  earth- 
goddess  Cybele  with  her  team  of  Hons  issuing  from  an 
arch  below  him.  At  this  point  the  diamond  balustrade 
suddenly  breaks  off  in  mid-space  and  ends  in  nothing.  ^ 
Endymion  calls  to  Jove  for  help  and  rescue,  and  is 
taken  up  on  the  wings  of  an  eagle  (is  this  the  eagle  of 
Dante  in  the  Purgatory  and  of  Chaucer  in  The  House 
of  Fame?),  who  swoops  down  with  him, — all  this  still 
happening,  be  it  remembered,  deep  within  the  bowels 
of  the  earth, — ^to  a  place  of  sweet  airs  of  flowers  and 
mosses.  He  is  deposited  in  a  jasmine  bower,  wonders 
within  himself  who  and  what  his  imknown  love  may  be, 
longs  to  force  his  way  to  her,  but  as  that  may  not  be, 
to  sleep  and  dream  of  her.  He  sleeps  on  a  mossy  bed; 
she  comes  to  him;  and  their  endearments  are  related, 
unluckily  in  a  very  cloying  and  distasteful  manner  of 
amatory   ejaculation.    It   was   a   flaw   in   Keats's   art 

^  There  is  a  certain,  though  slight  enough,  resemblance  between  some 
of  these  underground  incidents  and  those  which  happen  in  a  romance  of 
travel,  which  Keats  may  very  well  have  read,  the  Voyage  d' Anterior ,  then 

Eopular  both  in  France  and  in  an  English  translation.  Ant^nor  is  permitted 
y  the  Egyptian  priests  to  pass  through  the  triple  ordeal  by  fire,  water, 
and  air  contrived  by  them  in  the  vast  subterranean  vaults  under  the 
temple  of  Osiris.  The  points  of  most  resemblance  are  the  suspended 
guiding  Ught  seen  from  within  the  entrance,  the  rushing  of  the  water 
streams,  and  the  ascent  by  a  path  between  balustrades.  The  Voyage 
d'Antenor  was  itself  founded  on  an  earlier  and  much  rarer  French  romance, 
Sethos,  and  both  were  freely  and  avowedly  imitated  by  Thomas  Moore 
in  his  prose  tale,  the  Epicurean  (1827).  Mr  Robert  Bridges  has  noticed 
a  point  in  common  between  Endymion  and  the  Epicurean  in  the  sudden 
breaking  off  or  crumbling  away  of  the  balustrade  under  the  wayfarer's 
feet.  This  does  not  occur  in  Sethos  or  Antinor,  and  was  probably  borrowed 
by  Moore  from  Keats. 


THE  QUEST  RENEWED  187 

and  a  blot  on  his  genius — or  perhaps  only  a  consequence 
of  the  rawness  and  ferment  of  his  youth? — that  thinking 
nobly  as  he  did  of  love,  yet  when  he  came  to  relate  a  love- 
passage,  even  one  intended  as  this  to  be  symbolical  of 
ideal  things,  he  could  only  realize  it  in  terms  like  these. 
The  visitant,  w^hose  identity  is  still  unrecognized, 
again  disappears;  he  resumes  his  quest,  and  next  finds 
himself  in  a  huge  vaulted  grotto  full  of  sea  treasures 
and  sea  sounds  and  murmurs.  Here  he  goes  over  in 
memory  his  past  life  and  aspirations, 

— the  spur 
Of  the  old  bards  to  mighty  deeds:  his  plans 
To  nurse  the  golden  age  'mong  shepherd  clans: 
That  wondrous  night:  the  great  Pan-festival: 
His  sister's  sorrow;  and  his  wanderings  all. 
Until  into  the  earth's  deep  maw  he  rush'd: 
Then  all  its  buried  magic,  till  it  flush' d 
High  with  excessive  love.     *  And  now,'  thought  he, 
*How  long  must  I  remain  in  jeopardy 
Of  blank  amazements  that  amaze  no  more  ? 
Now  I  have  tasted  her  sweet  soul  to  the  core 
All  other  depths  are  shallow:  essences, 
Once  spiritual,  are  like  muddy  lees. 
Meant  but  to  fertilize  my  earthly  root. 
And  make  my  branches  lift  a  golden  fruit 
Into  the  bloom  of  heaven:  other  light. 
Though  it  be  quick  and  sharp  enough  to  blight 
The  Olympian  eagle's  vision,  is  dark. 
Dark  as  the  parentage  of  chaos.     Hark ! 
My  silent  thoughts  are  echoing  from  these  shells; 
Or  they  are  but  the  ghosts,  the  dying  swells 
Of  noises  far  away? — list ! — ' 

The  poet  seems  here  to  mean  that  in  the  seeker^s 
transient  hour  of  imion  with  his  unknown  divinity 
capacities  for  thought  and  emotion  have  been  awakened 
in  him  richer  and  more  spiritually  illuminating  than 
he  has  known  before.  The  strange  sounds  which  reach 
him  are  the  rushing  of  the  streams  of  the  river-god 
Alpheus  and  the  foimtain-nymph  Arethusa;  Arethusa 
fleeing,  Alpheus  pursuing  (according  to  that  myth 
which  is  told  most  fully  by  Ovid  and  which  Shelley's 


188         NEW  SYMPATHIES  AWAKENED 

lyric  has  made  familiar  to  all  English  readers);  he 
entreating,  she  longing  to  yield  but  fearing  the  wrath  of 
Diana.  Endjmiion,  who  till  now  has  had  no  thought 
of  anything  but  his  own  plight,  is  touched  by  the  pangs 
of  these  lovers  and  prays  to  his  goddess  to  assuage 
them.  We  are  left  to  infer  that  she  assents:  they 
plunge  into  a  gulf  and  disappear:  he  turns  to  follow  a 
path  which  leads  him  in  the  direction  of  a  cooler  light 
and  a  louder  sound: 

— and  lo  I 
More  suddenly  than  doth  a  moment  go. 
The  visions  of  the  earth  were  gone  and  fled — 
He  saw  the  giant  sea  above  his  head. 

Throughout  this  second  book  Keats  has  been  content 
to  let  the  mystery  and  ^buried  magic'  of  the  under- 
world reveal  itself  in  nothing  of  more  original  invention 
or  of  deeper  apparent  significance  than  the  spring 
awakening  of  Adonis  and  the  vision  of  the  earth-goddess 
Cybele.  His  under-world  is  no  Tartarus  or  Elysium, 
no  place  of  souls:  he  attempts  nothing  like  the  calling- 
up  of  the  ghosts  of  dead  heroes  by  Ulysses  in  the 
Odyssey,  still  less  like  the  mystic  revelation  of  a  future 
state  of  rewards  and  punishments  in  the  sixth  book 
of  the  Mneid.  Possibly  the  visit  of  the  disguised  Diana 
is  meant  to  have  a  double  meaning,  and  of  her  three 
characters  as  'Queen  of  Earth,  and  Heaven,  and  Hell,' 
to  refer  to  the  last,  that  of  a  goddess  of  the  imder-world 
and  of  the  dead,  and  at  the  same  time  to  s3niibolize  the 
power  of  the  spirit  of  Beauty  to  visit  the  poet's  soul  with 
joy  and  illumination  even  among  the  Mismal  elements' 
of  that  nether  sphere.  Into  the  rest  of  the  under-ground 
scenery  and  incidents  it  is  hard  to  read  any  symbolical 
meaning  or  anything  but  the  uncontrolled  and  aimless- 
seeming  play  of  invention.  But  in  what  is  now  to 
follow  we  are  conscious  of  a  fuller  meaning  and  a  stricter 
plan.  That  from  Diana,  conscious  of  her  own  weakness, 
indulgence  for  the  weakness  of  her  nymph  Arethusa 
should  be  won  by  the  prayer  of  Endymion,  now  for  the 
first  time  wrought  to  S3anpathy  with  the  sorrows  of 


BOOK  III.     EXORDIUM  189 

others,  is  a  clear  stage  in  the  development  of  the  poet's 
scheme.    The  next  stage  is  more  decisive  and  significant 

stm. 

Book  III.  Keats  begins  his  third  book  with  a  de- 
nunciation of  kings,  conquerors,  and  worldly  'regalities' 
in  general,  amplifying  in  his  least  fortunate  style  the 
ideas  contained  in  the  sonnet  'On  receiving  a  laurel 
crown  from  Leigh  Hunt'  written  the  previous  March 
in  the  copy  of  his  Poems  which  he  gave  to  Reynolds 
(see  above,  p.  57).  When  Keats  read  this  passage  to 
Bailey  at  Oxford,  Bailey  very  justly  found  fault  with 
some  forced  expressions  in  it  such  as  'baaing  vanities,' 
and  also,  he  tells  us,  with  what  seemed  to  him  an  over- 
done defiance  of  the  traditional  way  of  handling  the 
rimed  couplet.  From  denunciation  the  verse  passes 
into  narrative  with  the  question,  'Are  then  regalities 
all  gilded  masks?'  The  answer  is.  No,  there  are  a 
thousand  mysterious  powers  throned  in  the  universe 
— cosmic  powers,  as  we  should  now  say — ^most  of  them 
far  beyond  human  ken  but  a  few  within  it;  and  of 
these,  swears  the  poet,  the  moon  is  'the  gentlier- 
mightiest.'  Having  once  more,  in  a  strain  of  splendid 
nature-poetry,  praised  her,  he  resumes  his  tale,  and 
tells  how  Cjnithia,  pining  no  less  than  Endymion, 
sends  a  shaft  of  her  light  down  to  him  where  he  lies  on 
an  under-sea  bed  of  sand  and  pearls;  how  this  comforts 
him,  and  how  at  dawn  he  resumes  his  fated  journey. 
Here  follows  a  description  of  the  litter  of  the  Ocean 
floor  which,  as  we  shaU  see  later,  is  something  of  a 
challenge  to  Shakespeare  and  was  in  its  turn  something 
of  an  inspiration  to  Shelley.  Endymion  now  in  his 
own  person  takes  up  the  inexhaustible  theme  of  the 
moon's  praise,  asking  her  pardon  at  the  same  time  for 
having  lately  suffered  a  more  rapturous,  more  absorbing 
passion  to  come  between  him  and  his  former  youthful 
worship  of  her.  At  this  moment  the  wanderer's  attention 
is  suddenly  diverted, — 

For  as  he  lifted  up  his  eyes  to  swear 

How  his  own  goddess  was  past  all  things  fair. 


190  ENCOUNTER  WITH  GLAUCUS 

He  saw  far  in  the  green  concave  of  the  sea 
An  old  man  sitting  calm  and  peacefully. 
Upon  a  weeded  rock  this  old  man  sat, 
And  his  white  hair  was  awful,  and  a  mat 
Of  weeds  were  cold  beneath  his  cold  thin  feet. 

The  old  man  is  Glaucus,  and  the  rest  of  the  book  is 
taken  up  almost  entirely  with  his  story.  Keats^s 
reading  of  Ovid  had  made  him  familiar  with  this  story  :^ 
but  he  remodels  it  radically  for  his  own  ethical  and 
symbolic  purpose,  giving  it  turns  and  a  sequel  quite 
unknown  to  antiquity,  and  even  helping  himself  as  he 
felt  the  need  to  certain  incidents  and  machinery  of 
Oriental  magic  from  the  Arabian  Nights. 

Glaucus  at  first  sight  of  Endymion  greets  him  joy- 
fully, seeiAg  in  him  his  predestined  deliverer  from  the 
spell  of  palsied  age  which  binds  him.  But  Endymion 
cannot  endure  the  thought  of  being  diverted  from  his 
own  private  quest,  and  meets  the  old  man^s  welcome 
first  with  suspicious  terror  and  then  with  angry  defiance. 
The  grey-haired  creature  weeps:  whereupon  Endymion, 
newly  awakened  to  hiunan  sympathies,  is  struck  with 
remorse. 

Had  he  then  wrong'd  a  heart  where  sorrow  kept  ? 

He  had  indeed,  and  he  was  ripe  for  tears. 
The  penitent  shower  fell,  as  down  he  knelt 
Before  that  careworn  sage. 

They  rise  and  proceed  over  the  ocean  floor  together. 
Glaucus  tells  Endymion  his  history:  how  he  led  a 
quiet    and   kind   existence   as    a   fisherman   long   ago, 

1  How  familiar,  both  with  the  text  and  the  translator's  commentary, 
is  proved  by  his  adopting  as  his  own,  almost  literally,  a  phrase  which  Sandys 
brings  in  by  way  of  illustrative  comment  from  the  Imagines  (a  description 
of  an  imaginary  picture-gallery)  of  Philostratus.  Philostratus,  coming  to 
a  picture  of  Glaucus,  tells  how  the  painter  had  given  him  '  thick  and  arched 
eyebrows  which  touched  one  another.'     Keats  writes, — 

his  snow-white  brows 
Went  arching  up,  and  like  two  magic  ploughs 
Furrowed  deep  wrinkles  in  his  forehead  large. 

It  was  the  look  and  expression  of  Keats  in  reciting  this  same  phrase,  the 
reader  will  remember,  which  so  struck  Bailey  that  he  found  himself  vividly 
recalling  it  thirty  years  later  (see  above,  p.  144). 


GLAUCUS  RELATES  HIS  DOOM    191 

familiar  with  and  befriended  by  all  sear-creatures, 
even  the  fiercest,  until  he  was  seized  with  the  ambition 
to  be  free  of  Neptune's  kingdom  and  able  to  live  and 
breathe  beneath  the  sea;  how  this  desire  being  granted 
he  loved  and  pursued  the  sea-nymph  Scylla,  and  she 
feared  and  fled  him;  how  then  he  asked  the  aid  of  the 
enchantress  Circe,  who  made  him  her  thrall  and  lapped 
him  in  sensual  delights  while  Scylla  was  forgotten. 
How  the  witch,  the  ^arbitrary  queen  of  sense,'  one  day 
revealed  her  true  character,  and  'specious  heaven  was 
changed  to  real  hell.'  (Is  Keats  here  remembering  the 
closing  couplet  of  Shakespeare's  great  sonnet  against 
lust — 

This  all  the  world  well  knows;  but  none  know  well 
To  shun  the  heaven  that  leads  men  to  this  hell  ?) 

He  came  upon  her  torturing  her  crowd  of  spell-bound 
animals,  once  human  beings,  fled  in  terror  at  the  sight, 
was  overtaken,  and  with  savage  taunts  driven  back 
into  his  ocean-home.  Here  he  foimd  Scylla  cold  and 
dead,  killed  by  Circe's  arts.  (In  the  original  myth  as 
told  by  Ovid  and  others  Glaucus  refuses  the  temptations 
of  Circe,  who  in  revenge  inflicts  on  Scylla  a  worse 
punishment  than  death,  transforming  her  into  a  sea- 
monster  engirdled  with  a  pack  of  ravening  dogs  and 
stationed  as  a  terror  to  mariners  at  the  Straits  over 
against  Charybdis) .  Glaucus  then  tells  how  he  conveyed 
the  body  of  his  dead  love  to  a  niche  in  a  vacant  under-sea 
temple,  where  she  still  remains.  Then  began  the  doom 
of  paralysed  and  helpless  seniHty  which  the  enchantress 
had  condemned  him  to  endure  for  a  thousand  years 
and  which  still  binds  him  fast, — a  doom  which  inevitably 
reminds  us  of  such  stories  as  that  of  the  Fisherman  in 
the  Arabian  Nights,  and  of  the  spell  laid  by  Suleiman 
upon  the  rebellious  Djinn,  whom  he  imprisoned  for  a 
thousand  and  eight  hundred  years  in  a  bottle  imtil  the 
Fisherman  released  him. 

Glaucus  goes  on  to  relate  how  once,  in  the  course  of 
his  miserable  spell-bound  existence,  he  witnessed  the 
drowning  of  a  shipwrecked  crew  with  agony  at  his  own 


192        THE  PREDESTINED  DELIVERER 

helplessness,  and  in  trying  vainly  to  rescue  a  sinking 
old  man  by  the  hand  found  himself  left  with  a  wand 
and  scroll  which  the  old  man  had  held.  Reading  the 
scroll,  he  found  in  it  comfortable  words  of  hope  and 
wisdom.  (Note  that  it  was  through  an  attempted  act 
of  human  succour  that  this  wisdom  came  to  him).  If  he 
would  have  patience,  so  ran  the  promise  of  the  scroll, 
to  probe  all  the  depths  of  magic  and  the  hidden  secrets 
of  nature — ^if  moreover  he  would  piously  through  the 
centuries  make  it  his  business  to  lay  side  by  side  in 
sanctuary  all  bodies  of  lovers  drowned  at  sea — there 
would  one  day  'come  to  him  a  heaven-favoured  youth  to 
whom  he  would  be  able  to  teach  the  rites  necessary  for 
his  deliverance.  He  recognises  the  predestined  youth 
in  Endymion,  who  on  learning  the  nature  of  the  promise 
accepts  joyfully  his  share  in  the  prescribed  duty,  with 
the  attendant  risk  of  destruction  to  both  if  they  fail. 
The  young  man  and  the  old — or  rather  Hhe  young  soul 
in  age's  mask' — ^go  together  to  the  submarine  hall  of 
burial  where  Scylla  and  the  multitude  of  drowned  lovers 
lie  enshrined.  As  to  the  rites  that  follow  and  their 
effect,  let  us  have  them  in  the  poet's  own  words: — 

*  Let  us  commence/ 
Whispered  the  guide,  stuttering  with  joy,  *  even  now.* 
He  spake,  and,  trembling  like  an  aspen-bough. 
Began  to  tear  his  scroll  in  pieces  small. 
Uttering  the  while  some  mumblings  funeral. 
He  tore  it  into  pieces  small  as  snow 
That  drifts  unfeather'd  when  bleak  northerns  blow; 
And  having  done  it,  took  his  dark  blue  cloak 
And  bound  it  round  Endymion :  then  struck 
His  wand  against  the  empty  air  times  nine. — 
*  What  more  there  is  to  do,  young  man,  is  thine: 
But  first  a  little  patience;  first  undo 
This  tangled  thread,  and  wind  it  to  a  clue. 
Ah,  gentle !  'tis  as  weak  as  spider's  skein; 
And  shouldst  thou  break  it — What,  is  it  done  so  clean 
A  power  overshadows  thee !    O,  brave ! 
The  spite  of  hell  is  tumbling  to  its  grave. 
Here  is  a  shell ;  'tis  pearly  blank  to  me. 
Nor  mark'd  with  any  sign  or  charactery — 


THE  DELIVERANCE  193 

Canst  thou  read  aught  ?    O  read  for  pity's  sake ! 
Olympus  !  we  are  safe !     Now,  Carian,  break 
This  wand  against  yon  lyre  on  the  pedestal.' 

'Twas  done:  and  straight  with  sudden  swell  and  fall 

Sweet  music  breath'd  her  soul  away,  and  sigh'd 

A  lullaby  to  silence. — *  Youth  !  now  strew 

These  minced  leaves  on  me,  and  passing  through 

Those  files  of  dead,  scatter  the  same  around. 

And  thou  wilt  see  the  issue.' — 'Mid  the  sound 

Of  flutes  and  viols,  ravishing  his  heart, 

Endymion  from  Glaucus  stood  apart. 

And  scatter'd  in  his  face  some  fragments  light. 

How  lightning-swift  the  change !  a  youthful  wight 

Smiling  beneath  a  coral  diadem 

Out-sparkling  sudden  like  an  uptum'd  gem. 

Appear' d,  and,  stepping  to  a  beauteous  corse, 

Kneel'd  down  beside  it,  and  with  tenderest  force 

Press'd  its  cold  hand,  and  wept, — and  Scylla  sigh'd  I 

Endymion,  with  quick  hand,  the  charm  apply'd — 

The  nymph  arose:  he  left  them  to  their  joy. 

And  onward  went  upon  his  high  employ. 

Showering  those  powerful  fragments  on  the  dead. 

And  as  he  passed,  each  lifted  up  his  head. 

As  doth  a  flower  at  Apollo's  touch. 

Death  felt  it  to  his  inwards:  'twas  too  much: 

Death  fell  a  weeping  in  his  charnel-house. 

The  Latmian  persever'd  along,  and  thus 

All  were  re-animated.     There  arose 

A  noise  of  harmony,  pulses  and  throes 

Of  gladness  in  the  air — ^while  many,  who 

Had  died  in  mutual  arms  devout  and  true. 

Sprang  to  each  other  madly;  and  the  rest 

Felt  a  high  certainty  of  being  blest. 

They  gaz'd  upon  Endymion.     Enchantment 

Grew  drunken,  and  would  have  its  head  and  bent. 

Delicious  symphonies,  like  airy  flowers. 

Budded,  and  swell'd,  and,  full-blown,  shed  full  showers 

Of  light,  soft,  unseen  leaves  of  sounds  divine. 

The  two  deliverers  tasted  a  pure  wine 

Of  happiness,  from  fairy-press  ooz'd  out. 

Speechless  they  ey'd  each  other,  and  about 

The  fair  assembly  wander'd  to  and  fro. 

Distracted  with  the  richest  overflow 

Of  joy  that  ever  pour'd  from  heaven. 


194  MEANING  OF  THE  PARABLE 

The  whole  long  Glaucus  and  Scylla  episode  filling 
the  third  book,  and  especially  this  its  climax,  has  to 
many  lovers  and  students  of  Keats  proved  a  riddle  hard 
of  solution.  And  indeed  at  first  reading  the  meaning 
of  its  strange  incidents  and  imagery,  beautiful  as  is 
much  of  the  poetry  in  which  they  are  told,  looks  obscure 
enough.  Every  definite  clue  to  their  interpretation 
seems  to  elude  us  as  we  lay  hold  of  it,  like  the  drowned 
man  who  sinks  through  the  palsied  grasp  of  Glaucus. 
But  bearing  in  mind  what  we  have  recognised  as  the 
general  scope  and  symbolic  meaning  of  the  poem,  does 
not  the  main  purport  of  the  Glaucus  book,  on  closer 
study,  emerge  clearly  as  something  like  this?  The 
spirit  touched  with  the  divine  beam  of  Cynthia — ^that 
is  aspiring  to  and  chosen  for  communion  with  essential 
Beauty — in  other  words  the  spirit  of  the  Poet — ^must  ] 
prepare  itself  for  its  high  calling,  first  by  purging  away  / 
the  selfishness  of  its  private  passion  in  sympathy  with  / 
human  loves  and  sorrows,  and  next  by  acquiring  a/ 
full  store  alike  of  human  experience  and  of  philosophic/ 
thought  and  wisdom.  Endymion,  endowed  by  favour  or 
the  gods  with  the  poetic  gift  and  passion,  has  only 
begun  to  awaken  to  sympathy  and  acquire  knowledge 
when  he  meets  Glaucus,  whose  history  has  made  hun 
rich  in  all  that  Endymion  yet  lacks,  including  as  it  does 
the  forfeiting  of  simple  everyday  life  and  usefulness 
for  the  exercise  of  a  perilous  superhuman  gift;  the 
desertion,  under  a  spell  of  evil  magic,  of  a  pure  for  an 
impure  love;  the  tremendous  penalty  which  has  to  be 
paid  for  this  plunge  into  sensual  debasement;  the 
painful  acquisition  of  the  gift  of  righteous  magic,  or 
knowledge  of  the  secrets  of  nature  and  mysteries  of  life 
and  death,  by  prolonged  intensity  of  study,  and  the 
patient  exercise  of  the  duties  of  pious  tenderness  towards 
the  bodies  of  the  drowned.  At  the  approach  of  Endjonion 
the  sage  recognises  in  him  the  predestined  poet,  and 
hastens  to  make  over  to  him,  as  to  one  more  divinely 
favoured  than  himself,  all  the  dower  of  his  dearly 
bought  wisdom;    in  possession   of  which  the  poet  is 


ITS  MACHINERY  EXPLAINED  195 

enabled  to  work  miracles  of  joy  and  healing  and  to 
confer  immoi-tality  on  dead  lovers. 

As  to  the  significance  in  detail  of  the  rites  by  which 
the  transfer  of  powder  is  effected,  we  are  again  helped 
by  remembering  that  Keats  was  mixing  up  with  his 
classic  myth  ideas  taken  from  the  Thousand  and  One 
Nights,  Let  the  student  turn  to  the  Glaucus  and 
Circe  episodes  of  Ovid^s  Metamorphoses,  and  then 
refresh  his  memory  of  certain  Arabian  tales,  particularly 
that  of  Bebr  Salim,  with  its  kings  and  queens  of  the  sea 
living  and  moving  under  water  as  easily  as  on  land,  its 
repeated  magical  transformations  and  layings  on  and 
taking  off  of  enchantments,  and  the  adventures  of  the 
hero  \vdth  queen  Lab,  the  Oriental  counterpart  of 
Circe, — ^let  the  student  refresh  his  memory  from  these 
sources,  and  the  proceedings  of  this  episode  will  no 
longer  seem  so  strange.  In  the  Arabian  tales,  and  for 
that  matter  in  western  tales  of  magic  also,  the  commonest 
method  of  annulling  enchantments  is  by  sprinkling  with 
water  over  which  words  of  power  have  been  spoken. 
Under  sea  you  cannot  sprinkle  with  water,  so  Keats 
makes  Endymion  use  for  sprinkling  the  shredded 
fragments  of  the  scroll  taken  by  Glaucus  from  the 
drowned  man.  First  Glaucus  tears  the  scroll,  uttering 
'some  mumblings  funeraF  as  he  does  so  (compare  the 
'backward  mutters  of  dissevering  power'  in  Milton's 
Comus).  Then  follows  a  series  of  actions  showing  that 
the  hour  has  come  for  him  to  surrender  and  make  over 
his  powers  and  virtues  to  the  new  comer.  First  he 
invests  Endymion  with  his  own  magic  robe.  Then  he 
waves  his  magic  wand  nine  times  in  the  air, — as 
a  preliminary  to  the  last  exercise  of  its  power?  or 
as  a  sign  that  its  power  is  exhausted?  Nine  is  of 
course  a  magic  number,  and  the  immediate  sugges- 
tion comes  from  the  couplet  in  Sandys's  Ovid  where 
Glaucus  tells  how  the  sea-gods  admitted  him  to  their 
fellowship, — 

Whom  now  they  hallow,  and  with  charms  nine  times 
Repeated,  purge  me  from  my  human  crimes. 


196  THE  HAPPY  SEQUEL 

The  disentangling  of  the  skein  and  the  perceiving  and 
deciphering  of  runes  on  the  shell  ^  which  to  Glaucus  is  a 
blank  are  evidently  tests  Endymion  has  to  undergo 
before  it  is  proved  and  confirmed  that  he  is  really  the 
predestined  poet,  gifted  to  unravel  and  interpret 
mysteries  beyond  the  ken  of  mere  philosophy.  The 
breaking  of  the  philosopher's  wand  against  the  lyre 
suspended  from  its  pedestal,  followed  by  an  outburst  of 
ravishing  music,  is  a  farther  and  not  too  obscure  piece 
of  symbolism  shadowing  forth  the  surrender  and  absorp- 
tion of  the  powers  of  study  and  research  into  the  higher 
powers  of  poetic  intuition  and  inspiration.  And  then 
comes  the  general  disenchantment  and  awakening  of 
the  drowned  multitude  to  life  and  happiness. 

The  parable  breaks  off  at  this  point,  and  the  book 
closes  with  a  submarine  pageant  imagined,  it  would 
seem,  almost  singly  for  the  pageant^s  sake;  perhaps 
also  partly  in  remembrance  of  Spenser's  festival  of  the 
sea-gods  at  the  marriage  of  Thames  and  Medway  in 
the  fourth  book  of  the  Faerie  Queene.  The  rejuvenated 
Glaucus  bids  the  whole  beautiful  multitude  follow  him 
to  pay  their  homage  to  Neptune:  they  obey:  the 
first  crowd  of  lovers  restored  to  life  meets  a  second 
crowd  on  the  sand,  and  some  in  either  crowd  recognize 
and  happily  pair  off  with  their  lost  ones  in  the  other. 
All  approach  in  procession  the  palace  of  Neptune — 
another  marvel  of  vast  and  vague  jewelled  and  trans- 
lucent architectural  splendours — and  find  the  god 
presiding  on  an  emerald  throne  between  Venus  and 
Cupid.  Glaucus  and  Scylla  receive  the  blessing  of 
Neptune  and  Venus  respectively,  and  Venus  addresses 
Endymion  in  a  speech  of  arch  encouragement,  where 
the  poet's  style  (as  almost  always  in  moments  of  his 

1  Mr  Mackail  sees  in  this  shell  and  its  secret  characters  a  reminiscence 
of  the  mystic  shell,  which  is  also  a  book,  carried  in  the  right  hand  of  the 
sheikh  who  is  also  Don  Quixote  in  the  dream  narrated  by  Wordsworth  in 
the  third  book  of  The  Prelude.  I  owe  so  very  much  of  the  interpretation 
above  attempted  to  Mr  Mackail  that  I  am  bound  to  record  his  opinion: 
but  as  I  shall  show  later  (p.  251),  it  is  scarcely  possible  that  any  passages 
from  The  Prelude  should  have  come  to  Keats's  knowledge  until  after 
Endymion  was  finished. 


BOOK  IV.    ADDRESS  TO  THE  MUSE     197 

hero's  prosperous  love)  turns  common  and  tasteless. 
Dance  and  revelry  follow,  and  then  a  hymn  to  Neptune, 
Venus,  and  Cupid.  This  is  interrupted  by  the  entrance 
of  Oceanus  and  a  train  of  Nereids.  The  presence  of 
all  these  immortals  is  too  much  for  Endymion's  human 
senses:  he  swoons;  a  ring  of  Nereids  lift  and  carry 
him  tenderly  away;  he  is  aware  of  a  message  of  hope 
and  cheer  from  his  goddess,  written  in  starlight  on  the 
dark;  and  when  he  comes  to  himself,  finds  that  he  is 
restored  to  earth,  lying  on  the  grass  beside  a  forest 
pool  in  his  native  Caria. 

Book  IV.  In  this  book  Endymion  has  to  make  his 
last  discovery.  He  has  to  learn  that  all  transient  arid 
secondary  loves,  which  may  seem  to  come  between  him 
and  his  great  ideal  pursuit  and  lure  him  away  from  it, 
are  really,  when  the  truth  is  known,  but  encouragements 
to  that  pursuit,  visitations  and  condescensions  to  him 
of  his  celestial  love  in  disguise.  The  narrative  setting 
forth  this  discovery  is  pitched  in  a  key  which,  following' 
the  triumphant  close  of  the  last  book,  seems  curiously 
subdued  and  melancholy.  An  opening  apostrophe  by 
the  poet  to  the  Muse  of  his  native  land,  long  silent 
while  Greece  and  Italy  sang,  but  aroused  in  the  fuhiess 
of  time  to  happy  utterance,  begins  joyously  enough, 
but  ends  on  no  more  confident  note  than  this : — 

Great  Muse,  thou  know'st  what  prison 
Of  flesh  and  bone,  curbs,  and  confines,  and  frets 
Our  spirit's  wings:  despondency  besets 
Our  pillows;  and  the  fresh  to-morrow  mom 
Seems  to  give  forth  its  light  in  very  scorn 
Of  our  dull,  uninspir'd,  snail-paced  lives. 
Long  have  I  said,  how  happy  he  who  shrives 
To  thee  I     But  then  I  thought  on  poets  gone. 
And  could  not  pray: — nor  could  I  now — so  on 
I  move  to  the  end  in  lowliness  of  heart. — 

Keats  then  tells  how  his  hero,  paying  his  vows  to  the 
gods,  is  interrupted  by  the  plaint  of  a  forsaken  Indian 
damsel  which  reaches  him  through  the  forest  under- 
growth.    (Such  a  damsel  lying  back  on  the  grass  with  her 


198  THE  INDIAN  DAMSEL 

arms  among  her  hair  had  dwelt,  I  think,  in  the  poet's 
mind's  eye  from  pictures  by  or  prints  after  Poussin  ever 
since  hospital  and  early  Hunt  days,  and  had  been 
haunting  him  when  he  scribbled  his  attempted  scrap  of 
an  Alexander  romance  in  a  fellow-student's  notebook.) 
Endjmiion  listens  and  approaches:  the  poet  foresees  and 
deplores  the  coming  struggle  between  his  hero's  celestial 
love  and  this  earthly  beauty  disconsolate  at  his  feet.  The 
damsel,  speaking  to  herself,  laments  her  loneliness, 
and  tells  how  she  could  find  it  in  her  heart  to  love  this 
shepherd  youth,  and  how  love  is  lord  of  all.  Endymion 
falls  to  pitying  and  from  pitying  into  loving  her.  Though 
without  sense  of  treachery  to  his  divine  mistress,  he  is 
torn  by  the  contention  within  him  between  this  new 
earthly  and  his  former  heavenly  flame.  He  goes  on  to 
declare  the  struggle  is  killing  him,  and  entreats  the 
damsel  to  sing  him  a  song  of  India  to  ease  his  passing. 
Her  song,  telling  of  her  desolation  before  and  after  she 
was  swept  from  home  in  the  train  of  Bacchus  and  his 
rout  and  again  since  she  fell  out  of  the  march,  is,  in 
spite  of  one  or  two  unfortunate  blemishes,  among  the 
most  moving  and  original  achievements  of  English 
lyric  poetry.  Endjmiion  is  wholly  overcome,  and  in  a 
speech  of  somewhat  mawkish  surrender  gives  himself 
to  the  new  earthly  love,  not  blindly,  but  realising  fully 
what  he  forfeits.    He  bids  the  damsel — 

Do  gently  murder  half  my  soul,  and  I 
Shall  feel  the  other  half  so  utterly. 

A  cry  of  'Woe  to  Endymion!'  echoing  through  the 
forest  has  no  sooner  alarmed  the  lovers  than  there  is  a 
sudden  apparition  of  Mercury  descending.  The  gods 
intend  for  Endymion  an  unexpected  issue  from  his 
perplexities.  Their  messenger  touches  the  ground 
with  his  wand  and  vanishes:  two  raven-black  winged 
horses  rise  through  the  groimd  where  he  has  touched, — 
the  horses,  no  doubt,  of  the  imagination,  the  same 
or  of  the  same  breed  as  those  'steeds  with  streamy 
manes'   that   paw  up   against   the  light   and   trample 


AN  ETHEREAL  FLIGHT  199 

along  the  ridges  of  the  clouds  in  Sleejp  and  Poetry. 
Endymion  mounts  the  damsel  on  one  and  himself 
mounts  the  other:  they  are  borne  aloft  together, 

— unseen,  alone. 
Among  cool  clouds  and  winds,  but  that  the  free. 
The  buoyant  life  of  song,  can  floating  be 
Above  their  heads,  and  follow  them  untired. 

The  poet,  seeming  to  realise  that  the  most  difficult 
part  of  his  tale  is  now  to  tell,  again  invokes  the  native 
Muse,  and  relates  how  the  lovers,  couched  on  the  wings 
of  the  raven  steeds,  enter  on  their  flight  a  zone  of  mists 
enfolding  the  couch  of  Sleep,  who  has  been  drawn 
from  his  cave  by  the  rumour  of  the  coming  nuptials  of 
a  goddess  with  a  mortal.  The  narrative  is  here  very 
obscure,  but  seems  to  run  thus.  Alike  the  magic  steed 
and  the  lovers  reclining  on  their  wdngs  yield  to  the 
influence  of  sleep,  but  still  drift  on  their  aerial  course. 
As  they  drift,  Endymion  dreams  that  he  has  been 
admitted  to  Olympus.  In  his  dream  he  drinks  of 
Hebe's  cup,  tries  the  bow  of  ApoUo  and  the  shield  of 
Pallas;  blows  a  bugle  which  summons  the  Seasons 
and  the  Hours  to  a  dance;  asks  whose  bugle  it  is  and 
learns  that  it  is  Diana's;  the  next  moment  she  is 
there  in  presence;  he  springs  to  his  now  recognized 
goddess,  and  in  the  act  he  awakes,  and  it  is  a  case  of 
Adam's  dream  having  come  true;  he  is  aware  of 
Diana  and  the  other  celestials  present  bending  over 
him.  On  the  horse-plume  couch  beside  him  Kes  the 
Indian  maiden:  the  conflict  between  his  two  loves  is 
distractingly  renewed  within  him,  though  some  instinct 
again  tells  him  that  he  is  not  really  untrue  to  either. 
He  embraces  the  Indian  damsel  as  she  sleeps;  the 
goddess  disappears;  the  damsel  awakes;  he  pleads 
with  her,  says  that  his  other  love  is  free  from  all  mahce 
or  revenge  and  that  in  his  soul  he  feels  true  to  both. 

What  is  this  soul  then  ?    Whence 
Came  it  ?     It  does  not  seem  my  own,  and  I 
Have  no  self-passion  nor  identity. 


200  OLYMPIAN  VISIONS 

This  charge,  be  it  noted,  is  one  which  Keats  in  his 
private  thoughts  was  constantly  apt  to  bring  against 
himself.  Foreseeing  disaster  and  the  danger  of  losing 
both  his  loves  and  being  left  solitary,  Endymion  never- 
theless rouses  the  steeds  to  a  renewed  ascent.  He  and 
the  damsel  are  borne  towards  the  milky  way,  in  a 
mystery  of  loving  converse:  the  crescent  moon  appears 
from  a  cloud,  facing  them:  Endymion  turns  to  the 
damsel  at  his  side  and  finds  her  gone  gaunt  and  cold 
and  ghostly:  a  moment  more  and  she  is  not  there  at 
all  but  vanished:  her  horse  parts  company  from  his, 
towers,  and  falls  to  earth.  He  is  left  alone  on  his  further 
ascent,  abandoned  for  the  moment  by  both  the  objects 
of  his  passion,  the  celestial  and  the  human.  His  spirit 
enters  into  a  region,  or  phase,  of  involved  and  brooding 
misery  and  thence  into  one  of  contented  apathy:  he 
is  scarcely  even  startled,  though  his  steed  is,  by  a  flight 
of  celestial  beings  blowing  trumpets  and  proclaiming 
a  coming  festival  of  Diana.  In  a  choral  song  they 
invite  the  signs  and  constellations  to  the  festival: 
(the  picture  of  the  Borghese  Zodiac  in  Spencers  Polymetis 
has  evidently  given  Keats  his  suggestion  here).  Then 
suddenly  Endymion  hears  no  more  and  is  aware  that 
his  courser  has  in  a  moment  swept  him  down  to  earth 
again. 

He  finds  himself  on  a  green  hillside  with  the  Indian 
maiden  beside  him,  and  in  a  long  impassioned  pro- 
testation renounces  his  past  dreams,  condemns  his 
presimiptuous  neglect  of  human  and  earthly  joys,  and 
declares  his  intention  to  live  alone  with  her  for  ever 
and  (not  forgetting  to  propitiate  the  Olympians)  to 
shower  upon  her  all  the  treasures  of  the  pastoral 
earth: — 

O  I  have  been 
Presumptuous  against  love,  against  the  sky. 
Against  all  elements,  against  the  tie 
Of  mortals  each  to  each,  against  the  blooms 
Of  flowers,  rush  of  rivers,  and  the  tombs 
Of  heroes  gone !     Against  his  proper  glory 
Has  my  own  soul  conspired :  so  my  story 


DESCENT  AND  RENUNCIATION  201 

Will  I  to  children  utter,  and  repent. 

There  never  livM  a  mortal  man,  who  bent 

His  appetite  beyond  his  natural  sphere, 

But  starv'd  and  died.     My  sweetest  Indian,  here. 

Here  will  I  kneel,  for  thou  redeemed  hast 

My  life  from  too  thin  breathing:  gone  and  past 

Are  cloudy  phantasms.     Caverns  lone,  farewell  I 

And  air  of  visions,  and  the  monstrous  swell 

Of  visionary  seas  !     No,  never  more 

Shall  airy  voices  cheat  me  to  the  shore 

Of  tangled  wonder,  breathless  and  aghast. 

Here  Keats  spins  and  puts  into  the  mouth  of  Endymion 
wooing  the  Indian  maiden  a  long,  and  in  some  at  least 
of  its  verses  exquisite^  pastoral  fantasia  recalling,  and 
no  doubt  partly  founded  on,  the  famous  passage  in 
Ovid,  itself  founded  on  one  equally  famous  in  Theo- 
critus, where  Polyphemus  wooes  the  nymph  Galatea.^ 
Apparently,  though  it  was  through  sympathy  with  the 
human  sorrow  of  the  Indian  damsel  that  Endymion 
has  first  been  caught,  he  proposes  to  enjoy  her  society 
now  in  detachment  from  all  other  human  ties  as  well 
as  from  all  transcendental  dreams  and  ambitions. 

But  the  damsel  is  aware  of  matters  which  prevent  her 
from  falling  in  with  her  lover's  desires.  She  puts  him 
off,  saying  that  she  has  always  loved  him  and  longed 
and  languished  to  be  his,  but  that  this  joy  is  forbidden 
her,  or  can  only  be  compassed  by  the  present  death  of 
both  (that  is,  to  the  mortal  in  love  with  the  spirit 
of  poetry  and  poetic  beauty  no  life  of  mere  himian 
and  earthly  contentment  is  possible);  and  so  she  pro- 
poses to  renounce  him.  Despondingly  they  wander  off 
together  into  the  forest. 

The  poet  pauses  for  an  apostrophe  to  Endymion, 
confusedly  expressed,  but  vital  to  his  whole  meaning. 
His  suffering  hero,  he  says,  had  the  tale  allowed,  should 
have  been  enthroned  in  felicity  before  now  (the  word 
is  'ensky'd,'  from  Measure  for  Measure),  In  truth  he 
has  been  so  enthroned  for  many  thousand  years  (that 
is  to  say,  the  poetic  spirit  in  man  has  been  wedded  in 

1  Ovid,  Metam.  xiii,  810-840;  Theocr.  Idyll,  xi,  30  sqq. 


202  DISTRESSFUL  FAREWELLS 

full  communion  to  the  essential  soul  of  Beauty  in  the 
world):  the  poet,  Keats  himself,  has  had  some  help 
from  him  already,  and  with  his  farther  help  hopes  ere 
long  to  sing  of  his  ^lute-voiced  brother ^  that  is  Apollo, 
to  whom  Endymion  is  called  brother  as  being  espoused 
to  his  sister  Diana.  This  is  the  first  intimation  of 
Keats's  intention  to  write  on  the  story  of  Hyperion's 
fall  and  the  advent  of  Apollo.  But  the  present  tale, 
signifies  Keats,  has  not  yet  got  to  that  point,  and  must 
now  be  resumed. 

Endymion  rests  beside  the  damsel  in  a  part  of  the 
forest  where  every  tree  and  stream  and  slope  might 
have  reminded  him  of  his  boyish  sports,  but  his  down- 
cast eyes  fail  to  recognise  them.  Peona  appears;  he 
dreads  their  meeting,  but  without  cause;  interpreting 
things  by  their  obvious  appearance  she  sweetly  welcomes 
the  stranger  as  the  bride  her  brother  has  brought  home 
after  his  mysterious  absence,  and  bids  them  both  to  a 
festival  the  shepherds  are  to  hold  tonight  in  honour 
of  Cynthia,  in  whose  aspect  the  soothsayers  have  read 
good  omens.  Still  Endymion  does  not  brighten; 
Peona  asks  the  stranger  why,  and  craves  her  help  with 
him;  Endymion  with  a  great  effort,  'twanging  his 
soul  like  a  spiritual  bow^  says  that  after  all  he  has  gone 
through  he  must  not  partake  in  the  common  and  selfish 
pleasures  of  men,  lest  he  should  forfeit  higher  pleasures 
and  render  himself  incapable  of  the  services  for  which 
he  has  disciplined  himself;  that  henceforth  he  must 
live  as  a  hermit,  visited  by  none  but  his  sister  Peona. 
To  her  care  he  at  the  same  time  commends  the  Indian 
lady:  who  consents  to  go  with  her,  and  remembering 
the  approaching  festival  of  Diana  says  she  wiU  take 
part  in  it  and  consecrate  herseK  to  that  sisterhood  and 
to  chastity. 

For  a  while  they  all  three  feel  like  people  in  sleep 
struggling  with  oppressive  dreams  and  making  believe 
to  think  them  every-day  experiences.  Endymion 
tries  to  ease  the  strain  by  bidding  them  farewell.  They 
go  off  dizzily,  he  stares  distressfully  after  them  and 


THE  MYSTERY  SOLVED  203 

at  last  cries  to  them  to  meet  him  for  a  last  time  the 
same  evening  in  the  grove  behind  Diana's  temple. 
They  disappear;  he  is  left  in  sluggish  desolation  till 
sunset,  when  he  goes  to  keep  his  tryst  at  the  temple, 
musing  first  with  bitterness,  then  with  a  resigned 
prescience  of  coming  death  (the  mood  of  the  Nightingale 
Ode  appearing  here  in  Keats's  work  for  the  first  time): 
then  bitterly  again : — 

I  did  wed 
Myself  to  things  of  light  from  infancy; 
And  thus  to  be  cast  out,  thus  lorn  to  die 
Is  sure  enough  to  make  a  mortal  man 
Grow  impious.     So  he  inwardly  began 
On  things  for  which  no  wording  can  be  found; 
Deeper  and  deeper  sinking,  until  drown'd 
Beyond  the  reach  of  music :  for  the  choir 
Of  Cynthia  he  heard  not,  though  rough  briar 
Nor  muffling  thicket  interposed  to  dull 
The  vesper  hymn,  far  swollen,  soft  and  full. 
Through  the  dark  pillars  of  those  sylvan  aisles. 
He  saw  not  the  two  maidens,  nor  their  smiles. 
Wan  as  primroses  gather'd  at  midnight 
By  chilly  finger'd  spring.     *  Unhappy  wight ! 
Endymion ! '  ^aid  Peona,  *  we  are  here ! 
What  wouldst  thou  ere  we  all  are  laid  on  bier  ? ' 
Then  he  embrac'd  her,  and  his  lady's  hand 
Press'd  saying :  *  Sister,  I  would  have  command. 
If  it  were  heaven's  will,  on  our  sad  fate.' 
At  which  that  dark-eyed  stranger  stood  elate 
And  said,  in  a  new  voice,  but  sweet  as  love. 
To  Endymion's  amaze:  *By  Cupid's  dove. 
And  so  thou  shalt !  and  by  the  lily  truth 
Of  my  own  breast  thou  shalt,  beloved  youth  1' 
And  as  she  spake,  into  her  face  there  came 
Light,  as  reflected  from  a  silver  flame: 
Her  long  black  hair  swell'd  ampler,  in  display 
Full  golden;  in  her  eyes  a  brighter  day 
Dawn'd  blue  and  full  of  love.     Aye,  he  beheld 
Phoebe,  his  passion ! 

And  so  the  quest  is  ended,  and  the  mystery  solved. 
Vera  incessu  patuit  dea :  the  forsaken  Indian  maiden  had 
been  but  a  disguised  incarnation  of  Cynthia  herself. 
Endymion's  earthly  passion,  born  of  human  pity  and 


204  A  CHASTENED  VICTORY 

desire,  was  one  all  the  while,  had  he  but  known  it,  with 
his  heavenly  passion  born  of  poetic  aspiration  and  the 
soul's  thirst  for  Beauty.  The  two  passions  at  their 
height  and  perfection  are  inseparable,  and  the  crowned 
poet  and  the  crowned  lover  are  one.  But  these  things 
are  still  a  mystery  to  those  who  know  not  poetry,  and 
when  the  happy  lovers  disappear  the  kind  ministering 
sister  Peona  can  only  marvel: — 

Peona  went 
Home  through  the  gloomy  wood  in  wonderment. 

The  poem  ends  on  no  such  note  of  joy  and  triumph 
over  the  attained  consummation  as  we  might  have 
expected  and  such  as  we  foimd  at  the  close  of  the  third 
book,  at  the  point  where  the  faculty  and  vision  of  the 
poet  had  been  happily  enriched  and  completed  by  the 
gift  of  the  learning  and  beneficence  of  the  sage.  The 
fourth  book  closes,  as  it  began,  in  a  minor  key,  leaving 
the  reader,  like  Peona,  in  a  mood  rather  musing 
than  rejoicing.  Is  this  because  Keats  had  tired  of  his 
task  before  he  came  to  the  end,  or  because  the  low 
critical  opinion  of  his  own  work  which  he  had  been 
gradually  formiag  took  the  heart  out  of  him,  so  that  as 
he  drew  near  the  goal  he  involuntarily  let  his  mind  run 
on  the  hindrances  and  misgivings  which  beset  the 
poetic  aspirant  on  his  way  to  victory  more  than  on  the 
victory  itself  ?  Or  was  it  partly  because  of  the  numbing 
influence  of  early  winter  as  recorded  in  the  last  chapter? 
We  cannot  tell. 

But  why  take  all  this  trouble,  the  reader  may  well 
have  asked  before  now,  to  follow  the  argument  and  track 
the  wanderings  of  Endymion  book  by  book,  when 
everyone  knows  that  the  poem  is  only  admirable  for 
its  incidental  beauties  and  is  neither  read  nor  well 
readable  for  its  story  ?  The  answer  is  that  the  intricacy 
and  obscurity  of  the  narrative,  taken  merely  as  a 
narrative,  are  such  as  to  tire  the  patience  of  many 
readers  in  their  search  for  beautiful  passages  and  to 
dull  their  enjoyment  of  them  when  found;  but  once 
the   inner   and    symbolic    meanings   of   the   poem    are 


ABOVE  ANALYSIS  JUSTIFIED  205 

recognized,  even  in  gleams,  their  recognition  gives  it 
a  quite  new  hold  upon  the  attention.  And  in  order  to 
trace  these  meaniags  and  disengage  them  with  any 
clearness  a  fairly  close  examination  and  detailed  argu- 
ment are  necessary.  It  is  not  with  simple  matters  of 
personification,  of  the  putting  of  initial  capitals  to 
abstract  qualities,  that  we  have  to  deal,  nor  yet  with 
any  obvious  and  deliberately  thought-out  allegory; 
still  less  is  it  with  one  purposely  made  riddling  and 
obscure;  it  i^  with  a  vital,  subtly  involved  and  passion- 
ately tentative  spiritual  parable,  the  parable  of  the 
experiences  of  the  poetic  soul  in  man  seeking  communion 
with  the  spirit  of  essential  Beauty  in  the  world,  invented 
and  related,  in  the  still  uncertain  dawn  of  his  powers, 
by  one  of  the  finest  natural-bom  and  intuitively  gifted 
poets  who  ever  hved.  This  is  a  thing  which  stands 
almost  alone  in  literature,  and  however  imperfectly 
executed  is  worth  any  closeness  and  continuity  of 
attention  we  can  give  it.  Having  now  studied,  to  the 
best  of  our  power,  the  sources  and  scheme  of  the  poem, 
with  its  symbolism  and  inner  meanings  so  far  as  the}^ 
can  with  any  confidence  be  traced,  let  us  pass  to  the 
consideration  of  its  technical  and  poetical  qualities 
and  its  relation  to  the  works  of  certain  other  poets  and 
poems  of  Keats's  time. 


CHAPTER  VII 

ENDYMION.— II.    THE  POETRY:    ITS  QUALITIES  AND 
AFFINITIES 

Revival  of  Elizabethan  usages — Avoidance  of  closed  couplets — True 
metrical  instincts — An  example — Rime  too  much  his  master — Lax  use 
of  words — Flaws  of  taste  and  training — Faults  and  beauties  inseparable 
— Homage  to  the  moon — A  parallel  from  Drayton — Examples  of  nature- 
poetry — Nature  and  the  Greek  spirit — Greek  mythology  revitaUzed 
— Its  previous  deadness — Poetry  of  love  and  war — Dramatic  promise 
— Comparison  with  models — Sandys's  Ovid — Hymn  to  Pan:  Chapman 
— Ben  Jonson — The  hymn  in  Endymion — *A  pretty  piece  of  paganism' 
— Song  of  the  Indian  maiden — The  triumph  of  Bacchus — A  composite: 
its  sources — EngUsh  scenery  and  detail — Influence  of  Wordsworth — 
Influence  of  Shelley — Endymion  and  Alastor — Correspondences  and  con- 
trasts— Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty — Shelley  on  Endymion — Keats  and 
Clarence's  dream — Shelley  a  borrower — Shelley  and  the  rimed  couplet. 

Throughout  the  four  books  of  Endymion  we  find 
Keats  still  working,  more  even  than  in  his  epistles  and 
meditations  of  the  year  before,  under  the  spell  of  Eliza- 
bethan and  early  Jacobean  poetry.  Spenser  and  the 
Spenserians,  foremost  among  them  William  Browne; 
Drayton  in  his  pastorals  and  elegies;  Shakespeare, 
especially  in  his  early  poems  and  comedies;  Fletcher 
and  Ben  Jonson  in  pastoral  and  lyrical  work  like  The 
Faithful  Shepherdess  or  The  Sad  Shepherd;  Chapman's 
version  of  Homer,  especially  the  Odyssey  and  the  HymnSy 
and  Sandys's  of  the  Metamorphoses  of  Ovid;  these 
are  the  masters  and  the  models  of  whom  we  feel  his 
mind  and  ear  to  be  full.  In  their  day  the  English 
language  had  been  to  a  large  extent  unfixed,  and  in 
their  instinctive  efforts  to  enrich  and  expand  and  supple 
it,  poets  had  enjoyed  a  wide  range  of  freedom  both  in 

206 


REVIVAL  OF  ELIZABETHAN  USAGES     207 

maintaining  old  and  in  experimenting  with  new  usages. 
Many  of  the  Hberties  they  used  were  renounced  by  the 
differently  minded  age  which  followed  them,  and  the 
period  from  the  Restoration,  roughly  speaking,  to 
the  middle  years  of  George  III  had  in  matters  of  literary 
form  and  style  been  one  of  steadily  tightening  restriction 
and  convention.  Then  ensued  the  period  of  expansion, 
in  which  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  and  Scott  had  been 
the  most  conspicuous  leaders,  each  after  his  manner, 
in  reconquering  the  freedom  of  poetry.  Other  innovators 
had  followed  suit,  including  Leigh  Hunt  in  that  slippered, 
sentimental,  Italianate  fashion  of  his  own.  And  now 
came  young  Keats,  not  following  closely  along  the 
paths  opened  by  any  of  these,  though  closer  to  Leigh 
Hxmt  than  to  the  others,  but  making  a  deliberate 
return  to  certain  definite  and  long  abandoned  usages 
of  the  English  poets  during  the  illustrious  half  century 
from  1590-1640.  He  chose  the  heroic  couplet,  and  in 
handling  it  reversed  the  settled  practice  of  more  than  a 
century.  He  was  even  more  sedulous  than  any  of  his 
Elizabethan  or  Jacobean  masters  to  achieve  variety 
of  pause  and  movement  by  avoiding  the  regular  beat 
of  the  closed  couplet;  while  in  framing  his  style  he  did 
not  scruple  to  revive  all  or  nearly  all  those  licences  of 
theirs  which  the  intervening  age  had  disallowed.  There 
was  a  special  rashness  in  his  attempt  considering  the 
slightness  of  his  own  critical  equipment,  and  considering 
also  the  strength  of  the  long  riveted  fetters  which  he 
imdertook  to  break  and  the  charges  of  affectation  and 
impertinence  which  such  a  revival  of  obsolete  metrical 
and  verbal  usages — ^the  marks  of  what  Pope  had  de- 
nounced as  'our  inistic  vein  and  splay-foot  verse' — ^was 
bound  to  bring  against  him. 

First  of  his  revolutionary  treatment  of  the  metre. 
He  no  longer  uses  double  or  feminine  endings,  as  in  his 
epistles  of  the  year  before,  with  a  profusion  like  that  of 
Britannia^s  Pastorals.  They  occur,  but  in  moderation, 
hardly  more  than  a  score  of  them  in  any  one  of  the  four 
books.    At  the  beginning  he  tries  often^  but  afterwards 


208     AVOIDANCE  OF  CLOSED  COUPLETS 

gives  up,  an  occasional  trick  of  the  Elizabethan  and 
earlier  poets  in  riming  on  the  unstressed  second  syllables 
of  words  such  as  ^dancing'  (rimed  with  ^string'), 
'elbow'  (with  'slowO;  'velvet'  (with  'set'),  'purplish' 
(with  'fish').  On  the  other  hand  he  regularly  resolves 
the  'tion'  or  'shion'  termination  into  its  full  two 
syllables,  the  last  carrying  the  rime,  as — 'With  speed 
of  five-tailed  exhalations:'  'Before  the  deep  intoxica- 
tion;' 'Vanish'd  in  elemental  passion;'  and  the  like. 
He  admits  closed  couplets,  but  very  grudgingly,  as  a 
general  rule  in  the  proportion  of  not  more  than  one  to 
eight  or  ten  of  the  unclosed.  He  seldom  allows  himself 
even  so  much  of  a  continuous  run  of  them  as  this: — 

Moreover,  through  the  dancing  poppies  stole 

A  breeze  most  softly  lulling  to  my  soul; 

And  shaping  visions  all  about  my  sight 

Of  colours,  wings,  and  bursts  of  spangly  light; 

The  which  became  more  strange,  and  strange,  and  dim. 

And  then  were  gulph'd  in  a  tumultuous  swim: 

Or  this:— 

So  in  that  crystal  place,  in  silent  rows. 

Poor  lovers  lay  at  rest  from  joys  and  woes. — 

The  stranger  from  the  mountains,  breathless,  trac'd 

Such  thousands  of  shut  eyes  in  order  placed; 

Such  ranges  of  white  feet,  and  patient  lips 

All  ruddy, — for  here  death  no  blossom  nips. 

He  marked  their  brows  and  foreheads;  saw  their  hair 

Put  sleekly  on  one  side  with  nicest  care. 

The  essential  principle  of  his  versification  is  to  let 
sentences,  prolonged  and  articulated  as  freely  and 
naturally  as  in  prose,  wind  their  way  in  and  out  among 
the  rimes,  the  full  pause  often  splitting  a  couplet  by 
falling  at  the  end  of  the  first  line,  and  oftener  still  (in 
the  proportion  of  two  or  three  times  to  one)  breaking 
up  a  single  line  in  the  middle  or  at  any  point  of  its  course. 
Sense  and  sound  flow  habitually  over  from  one  couplet 
to  the  next  without  logical  or  grammatical  pause,  but 
to  keep  the  sense  of  metre  present  to  the  ear  Keats 
commonly  takes  care  that  the  second  line  of  a  couplet 


TRUE  METRICAL  INSTINCTS  209 

shall  end  with  a  fully  stressed  rime-word  such  as  not 
only  allows,  but  actually  invites,  at  least  a  momentary 
breathing-pause  to  follow  it.  It  is  only  in  the  rarest 
cases  that  he  compels  the  breath  to  hurry  on  with  no 
chance  of  stress  or  after-rest  from  a  light  preposition 
at  the  end  of  a  line  to  its  object  at  the  beginning  of  the 
next  (^on  |  His  left/  'upon  |  A  dreary  morning'),  or 
from  an  auxiliary  to  its  verb  ('as  might  be  |  Remem- 
bered 0  or  from  a  comparative  particle  to  the  thing 
compared  ('sleeker  than  |  Night-swollen  mushrooms 0; 
a  practice  in  which  Chapman,  Ben  Jonson,  Fletcher,  and 
their  contemporaries  indulged,  as  we  have  seen,  freely, 
and  which  afterwards  developed  into  a  fatal  disease 
of  the  metre.  Keats's  musical  and  metrical  instincts 
were  too  fine,  and  his  ear  too  early  trained  in  the  'sweet- 
slipping'  movement  of  Spenser,  to  let  him  fall  often 
into  this  fault.  To  the  other  besetting  fault  of  some 
of  these  masters,  that  of  a  harsh  and  jolting  ruggedness, 
he  was  still  less  prone.  Although  he  chooses  to  forego 
that  special  effect  of  combined  vigour  and  smoothness 
proper  to  the  closed  couplet,  he  always  knows  how  to 
make  a  rich  and  varied  music  with  his  vowel  sounds; 
while  the  same  fine  natural  instinct  for  sentence- 
structure  as  distinguishes  the  prose  of  his  letters  makes 
itself  felt  in  his  verse,  so  that  wherever  he  has  need  to 
place  a  full  stop  he  can  make  his  sentence  descend  upon 
it  smoothly  and  skimmingly,  like  a  seabird  on  the  sea.^ 


^Why  will  my  friend  Professor  Saintsbury,  in  range  of  reading  and 
industry  the  master  of  us  all,  insist  on  trying  to  persuade  us  that  m  the 
metre  of  Endymion  Keats  owed  something  to  the  Pharonnida  of  William 
Chamberlayne  ?  There  is  absolutely  no  metrical  usage  in  Keats's  poem 
for  which  his  familiar  Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  masters  do  not  furnish 
ample  precedent:  he  differs  from  them  only  in  taking  more  special  care 
to  avoid  any  prolonged  run  of  closed  couplets.  I  do  not  beheve  he  could 
have  brought  himself  to  read  two  pages  of  Pharonnida.  But  that  is  only 
an  opinion,  and  the  matter  can  be  decided  by  a  simple  computation  on 
the  fingers.  The  fact  is  that  there  are  no  five  pages  of  Pharonnida  which 
do  not  contain  more  of  those  unfortunate  rimings  on  'in'  and  'by'  and 
'to'  and  'on'  and  'of^  followed  by  their  nouns  in  the  next  Hne,  or  worse 
still,  on  'to'  followed  by  its  infinitive, — on  'it'  and  'than'  and  'be' 
and  'which,'  and  all  the  featherweight  particles  and  prepositions  and 
auxiUaries  and  relatives  impossible  to  stress  or  pause  on  for  a  moment, — 
than  can  be  found  in  any  whole  book  of  Endymion.     It  is  also  a  fact  that 


210  AN  EXAMPLE 

The  long  passage  quoted  from  Book  III  in  the  last 
chapter  illustrates  the  narrative  verse  of  Endymion  in 
nearly  all  its  moods  and  variations.  Here  is  a  character- 
istic example  of  its  spoken  or  dramatic  verse.  Endymion 
supplicates  his  goddess  from  underground: — 


O  Haunter  chaste 
Of  river  sides,  and  woods,  and  heathy  waste, 
Where  with  thy  silver  bow  and  arrows  keen 
Art  thou  now  forested  ?    O  Woodland  Queen, 
What  smoothest  air  thy  smoother  forehead  woos  ? 
Where  dost  thou  listen  to  the  wide  halloos 
Of  thy  disparted  nymphs  ?     Through  what  dark  tree 
Glimmers  thy  crescent  ?     Wheresoe'er  it  be, 
'Tis  in  the  breath  of  heaven:  thou  dost  taste 
Freedom  as  none  can  taste  it,  nor  dost  waste 
Thy  loveliness  in  dismal  elements; 
But,  finding  in  our  green  earth  sweet  contents. 
There  livest  blissfully.     Ah,  if  to  thee 
It  feels  Elysian,  how  rich  to  me. 
An  exird  mortal,  sounds  its  pleasant  name  I 
Within  my  breast  there  lives  a  choking  flame — 
O  let  me  cool't  the  zephyr-boughs  among ! 
A  homeward  fever  parches  up  my  tongue — 
O  let  me  slake  it  at  the  running  springs  ! 
Upon  my  ear  a  noisy  nothing  rings — 
O  let  me  once  more  hear  the  linnet's  note ! 
Before  mine  eyes  thick  films  and  shadows  float — 
O  let  me  'noint  them  with  the  heaven's  light  I 
Dost  thou  now  lave  thy  feet  and  ankles  white  ? 
O  think  how  sweet  to  me  the  freshening  sluice ! 
Dost  thou  now  please  thy  thirst  with  berry-juice? 
O  think  how  this  dry  palate  would  rejoice ! 
If  in  soft  slumber  thou  dost  hear  my  voice, 
O  think  how  I  should  love  a  bed  of  flowers ! — 


The  first  fifteen  lines  of  the  above  are  broken  and  varied 
much  in  Keats's  usual  way:    in  the  following  fourteen 

the  average  proportion  of  lines  not  ending  with  a  comma  or  other  pause 
is  in  Pharonriida  about  ten  to  one,  and  in  Endymion  not  more  than  two  and 
a  half  to  one.  That  the  sentence-structure  of  Pharonnida  is  as  detestably 
disjointed  and  invertebrate  as  that  of  Endymion  is  graceful  and  well- 
articulated  I  hesitate  to  insist,  because  that  again  is  a  matter  of  ear  and 
feeling,  and  not,  like  my  other  points,  of  sheer  arithmetic. 


RIME  TOO  MUCH  HIS  MASTER         211 

it  is  to  be  noted  how  he  throws  the  speaker's  alternate 
complaints  of  his  predicament  and  prayers  for  release 
from  it  not  into  twinned  but  into  split  or  parted  couplets, 
making  each  prayer  rime  not  with  the  complaint  which 
calls  it  forth  but  with  the  new  complaint  which  is  to 
follow  it:  a  bold  and  to  my  ear  a  happy  sacrifice  of 
obvious  rhetorical  effect  to  his  predilection  for  the 
suspended  or  delayed  rime-echo. 

Rime  is  to  some  poets  a  stiff  and  grudging  but  to  others 
an  officious  servant,  over-active  in  offering  suggestions 
to  the  mind;  and  no  poet  is  rightly  a  master  until  he 
has  learnt  how  to  sift  those  suggestions,  rejecting  many 
and  accepting  only  the  fittest.  Keats  in  Endymion 
has  not  reached  nor  come  near  reaching  this  mastery: 
in  the  flush  and  eagerness  of  composition  he  is  content 
to  catch  at  almost  any  and  every  suggestion  of  the 
rime,  no  matter  how  far-fetched  and  irrelevant.  He 
had  a  great  fore-runner  in  this  fault  in  Chapman,  who 
constantly,  especially  in  the  Iliad,  wrenches  into  his 
text  for  the  rime's  sake  ideas  that  have  no  kind  of 
business  there.  Take  the  passage  justly  criticised 
by  Bailey  at  the  beginning  of  the  third  Book : — 

There  are  who  lord  it  o'er  their  fellow-men 

With  most  prevailing  tinsel :  who  unpen 

Their  baaing  vanities,  to  browse  away 

The  comfortable  green  and  juicy  hay 

From  human  pastures;  or,  O  torturing  fact ! 

Who,  through  an  idiot  blink,  will  see  unpacked 

Fire-branded  foxes  to  sear  up  and  singe 

Our  gold  and  ripe-ear'd  hopes.     With  not  one  tinge 

Of  sanctuary  splendour,  not  a  sight 

Able  to  face  an  owl's,  they  still  are  dight 

By  the  blear-ey'd  nations  in  empurpled  vests, 

And  crowns,  and  turbans. 

Here  it  is  obviously  the  need  of  a  rime  to  'men'  that 
has  suggested  the  word  'unpen'  and  the  clumsy  imagery 
of  the  'baaing  sheep'  which  follows,  while  the  in- 
appropriate and  almost  meaningless  'tmge  of  sanctuary 
splendour 'Tower  down  has  been  imported  for  the  sake 
of  the'  foxes  with  fire-brands  tied  to  their  tails  which 


212  LAX  USE  OF  WORDS 

'singe'  the  metaphorical  corn-sheaves  (they  come 
from  the  story  of  Samson  in  the  Book  of  Judges). 
Milder  cases  abound,  as  this  of  Circe  tormenting  her 

victims : — 

appealing  groans       \ 
From  their  poor  breasts  went  sueing  to  her  ear    ^ 
In  vain;  remorseless  as  an  infant's  bier 
She  whisk'd  against  their  eyes  the  sooty  oil. 

Does  yonder  thrush. 
Schooling  its  half-fledg'd  little  ones  to  brush 
About  the  dewy  forest,  whisper  tales. 
Speak  not  of  grief,  young  stranger,  or  cold  snails 
Will  slime  the  rose  to-night. 

He  rose :  he  grasp'd  his  stole. 
With  convuls'd  clenches  waving  it  abroad. 
And  in  a  voice  of  solemn  joy,  thai  aw'd 
Echo  into  oblivion,  he  said: — 

Yet  hourly  had  he  striven 
To  hide  the  cankering  venom,  that  had  riven 
His  fainting  recollections. 

The  wanderer 
Holding  his  forehead  to  keep  off  the  burr 
Of  smothering  fancies. 

Endymion !  the  cave  is  secreter 
Than  the  isle  of  Delos.     Echo  hence  shall  stir 
No  sighs  but  sigh-warm  kisses,  or  light  noise 
Of  thy  combing  hand,  the  while  it  travelling  cloys 
And  trembles  through  my  labyrinthine  hair. 

In  some  of  these  cases  the  trouble  is,  not  that  the 
rime  drags  in  a  train  of  far-fetched  or  intrusive  ideas, 
but  only  that  words  are  used  for  the  rime's  sake  in 
inexact  and  inappropriate  senses.  Such  laxity  in  the 
employment  of  words  is  one  of  the  great  weaknesses 
of  Keats's  style  in  Endymion,  and  is  no  doubt  partly 
connected  with  his  general  disposition  to  treat  language 
as  though  it  were  as  free  and  fluid  in  his  own  day  as 
it  had  been  two  hundred  years  earlier.  The  same 
disposition  makes  him  reckless  in  turning  verbs  into 
nouns  (a  'complain,'  an  'exclaim,'  a  'shine,'  a  'pierce/ 


FLAWS  OF  TASTE  AND  TRAINING      213 

a  'quell')  and  nouns  into  verbs  (to  Hhroe/  to  ^passion/ 
to  *  monitor/  to  'fragment  up');  in  using  at  his  con- 
venience active  verbs  as  passive  and  passive  verbs  as 
active;  and  in  not  only  reviving  archaic  participial 
forms  ('dight/  ^ fight/  'raft/  etc.)  but  in  giving  cur- 
rency to  participles  of  the  class  Coleridge  denounced  as 
demoralizing  to  the  ear,  and  as  hybrids  equivocally 
generated  of  noun-substantives  ('emblem'd/  ^gor- 
dian'd/  'mountain'd/  'phantasy'd'),  as  well  as  to 
adjectives  borrowed  from  Elizabethan  use  or  new- 
minted  more  or  less  in  accordance  with  it  (^pipy/  ^paly/ 
'ripply/  'sluicy/  'slumbery/  'towery/  'bowery/  'orby/ 
'nervy/  'surgy/  'sparry/  'spangly').  It  was  these  and 
such  like  technical  liberties  with  language  w^hich  scan- 
dalised conservative  critics,  and  caused  even  De  Quincey, 
becoming  tardily  acquainted  with  Keats's  work,  to  dislike 
and  utterly  imder-rate  it.  He  himseK  came  before  long 
to  condemn  the  style  of '  the  slipshod  Endymion.'  Never- 
theless the  consequence  of  his  experiments  in  reviving  or 
imitating  the  usages  of  the  great  Renaissance  age  of 
English  poetry  is  only  in  part  to  be  regretted.  His  rash- 
ness led  him  into  almost  as  many  felicities  as  faults,  and 
the  examples  of  the  happier  hberties  in  Endymion  has 
done  much  towards  enriching  the  vocabulary  and  diction 
of  English  poetry  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

Other  faults  that  more  gravely  mar  the  poem  are  net 
technical  but  spiritual:  intimate  failures  of  taste  and 
feeling  due  partly  to  mere  rawness  and  inexperience, 
partly  to  excessive  intensity  and  susceptibility  of 
temperament,  partly  to  second-rateness  of  social  train- 
ing and  association.  A  habit  of  cloying  over-luxuriance 
in  description,  the  giving  way  to  a  sort  of  swooning 
abandonment  of  the  senses  in  contact  with  the 
'  dehciousness '  of  things,  is  the  most  besetting  of  such 
faults.  Allied  with  it  is  Keats's  treatment  of  love  as 
an  actuality,  which  in  this  poem  is  in  unfortunate  and 
distasteful  contrast  with  his  high  conception  of  love  in 
the  abstract  as  the  inspiring  and  ennobling  power  of 
the  world  and  all  things  in  it.    Add  the  propensity  to 


214    FAULTS  AND  BEAUTIES  INSEPARABLE 

make  Glaucus  address  Scylla  as  Himid  thing!'  and 
Endymion  beg  for  ^one  gentle  squeeze'  from  his  Indian 
maiden,  with  many  a  Hke  turn  in  the  simpering,  familiar 
mood  which  Keats  at  this  time  had  caught  from  or 
naturally  shared  with  Leigh  Hunt.  It  should,  however, 
be  noted  as  a  mark  of  progress  in  self-criticism  that, 
compariag  the  drafts  of  the  poem  with  the  printed  text, 
we  find  that  in  revising  it  for  press  he  had  turned  out 
more  and  worse  passages  in  this  vein  than  he  left  in. 

From  flaws  or  disfigurements  of  one  or  other  of  these 
kinds  the  poem  is  never  free  for  more  than  a  page  or 
two,  and  rarely  for  so  much,  at  a  time.  But  granting  all 
weaknesses  and  immaturities  whether  of  form  or  spirit, 
what  a  power  of  poetry  is  in  Endymion:  what  evidence, 
immistakeable,  one  would  have  said,  to  the  blindest, 
of  genius.  Did  any  poet  in  his  twenty-second  yeai: 
ever  write  with  so  prodigal  an  activity  of  iavention, 
however  undisciplined  and  unbraced,  or  with  an  im- 
agination so  penetrating  to  divine  and  so  swift  to  evoke 
beauty?  Were  so  many  faults  and  failures  ever  inter- 
spersed with  felicities  of  married  sound  and  sense  so 
frequent  and  absolute,  and  only  to  be  matched  in  the 
work  of  the  ripest  masters?  Lost  as  the  reader  may 
often  feel  himself  among  the  phantasmagoric  intricacies 
of  the  tale,  cloyed  by  its  amatory  insipidities,  bewildered 
by  the  redundancies  of  an  -invention  stimulated  into 
over-activity  by  any  and  every  chance  feather-touch 
of  association  or  rime-suggestion,  he  can  afford  to  be 
patient  in  the  certainty  of  coming,  from  one  page  to 
another,  upon  touches  of  true  and  fresh  inspiration  in 
almost  every  strain  and  mode  of  poetry.  Often  the 
inspired  poet  and  the  raw  cockney  rimester  come 
inseparably  coupled  in  the  limit  of  half  a  dozen  lines, 
as  thus  in  the  narrative  of  Glaucus : — 

Upon  a  dead  thing's  face  my  hand  I  laid; 
I  look'd — 'twas  Scylla !    Cursed,  cursed  Circe  I 
O  vulture-witch,  hast  never  heard  of  mercy  ? 
Could  not  thy  harshest  vengeance  be  content. 
But  thou  must  nip  this  tender  innocent 


HOMAGE  TO  THE  MOON  215 

Because  I  loved  her  ? — Cold,  0  cold  indeed 
Were  her  fair  limbs,  and  like  a  common  weed 
The  sea-^well  took  her  hair. 

or  thus  from  the  love-making  of  Cynthia: — 

Now  I  swear  at  once 
That  I  am  wise,  that  Pallas  is  a  dunce — 
Perhaps  her  love  like  mine  is  but  unknown — 

0  I  do  think  that  I  have  been  alone 

In  chastity:  yes,  Pallas  has  been  sighing. 
While  every  eve  saw  me  my  hair  uptying, 
With  fingers  cool  as  aspen  leaves. 

In  like  manner  the  unfortunate  opening  of  Book  III 
above  cited  leads  on,  as  Mr  de  Selincourt  has  justly 
observed,  to  a  passage  in  praise  of  the  moon  which  is 
among  the  very  finest  and  best  sustained  examples  of 
Keats's  power  in  nature-poetry.  For  quotation  I  will 
take  not  this  but  a  second  invocation  to  the  moon 
which  follows  a  little  later,  for  the  reason  that  in  it 
the  raptures  and  longings  which  the  poet  puts  into  the 
mouth  of  his  hero  are  really  in  a  large  measure  his 
own: — 

What  is  there  in  thee.  Moon !  that  thou  shouldst  move 
My  heart  so  potently  ?     When  yet  a  child 

1  oft  have  dry'd  my  tears  when  thou  hast  smil'd. 
Thou  seem'dst  my  sister :  hand  in  hand  we  went 
From  eve  to  morn  across  the  firmament. 

No  apples  would  I  gather  from  the  tree. 

Till  thou  hadst  cool'd  their  cheeks  deliciously: 

No  tumbling  water  ever  spake  romance. 

But  when  my  eyes  with  thine  thereon  could  dance: 

No  woods  were  green  enough,  no  bower  divine, 

Until  thou  liftedst  up  thine  eyelids  fine: 

In  sowing  time  ne'er  would  I  dibble  take, 

Or  drop  a  seed,  till  thou  wast  wide  awake; 

And,  in  the  summer  tide  of  blossoming. 

No  one  but  thee  hath  heard  me  blythly  sing 

And  mesh  my  dewy  flowers  all  the  night. 

No  melody  was  like  a  passing  spright 

If  it  went  not  to  solemnize  thy  reign. 

Yes,  in  my  boyhood  every  joy  and  pain 

By  thee  were  fashioned  in  the  self -same  end; 

And  as  I  grew  in  years,  still  didst  thou  blend 


216  A  PARALLEL  FROM  DRAYTON 

With  all  my  ardours:  thou  wast  the  deep  glen; 
Thou  wast  the  mountain-top — the  sage's  pen — 
The  poet's  harp — the  voice  of  friends — the  sun; 
Thou  wast  the  river — thou  wast  glory  won; 
Thou  wast  my  clarion's  blast — thou  wast  my  steed — 
My  goblet  full  of  wine — my  topmost  deed : — 
Thou  wast  the  charm  of  women,  lovely  Moon  I      ^ 
O  what  a  wild  and  harmonized  tune 
My  spirit  struck  from  all  the  beautiful ! 

In  the  last  two  lines  of  the  above  Keats  gives  us  the 
essential  master  key  to  his  own  poetic  nature  and  being. 
The  eight  preceding,  from  ^As  I  grew  in  years'  offer 
in  their  rhetorical  form  a  curious  parallel  with  a  passage 
of  similar  purport  in  Drayton's  Endimion  and  Phoebe: — 

Be  kind  (quoth  he)  sweet  Nymph  unto  thy  lover. 

My  soul's  sole  essence  and  my  senses'  mover. 

Life  of  my  life,  pure  Image  of  my  heart. 

Impression  of  Conceit,  Invention,  Art. 

My  vital  spirit  receives  his  spirit  from  thee. 

Thou  art  that  all  which  ruleth  all  in  me. 

Thou  art  the  sap  and  life  whereby  I  live. 

Which  powerful  vigour  doth  receive  and  give. 

Thou  nourishest  the  flame  wherein  I  bum, 

The  North  whereto  my  heart's  true  touch  doth  turn. 

Was  Keats,  then,  after  all  familiar  with  the  rare  volume 
in  which  alone  Drayton's  early  poem  had  been  printed, 
or  does  the  similar  turn  of  the  two  passages  spring  from 
some  innate  affinity  between  the  two  poets, — or  perhaps 
merely  from  the  natural  suggestion  of  the  theme? 

In  nature-poetry,  and  especially  in  that  mode  of  it 
in  which  the  poet  goes  out  with  his  whole  being  into 
nature  and  loses  lus  identity  in  delighted  sjnnpathy 
with  her  doings,  Keats  already  shows  himself  a  master 
scarcely  excelled.  Take  the  lines  near  the  beginning 
which  tell  of  the  'silent  workings  of  the  dawn'  on  the 
morning  of  Pan's  festival: — 

Rain-scented  eglantine 
Gave  temperate  sweets  to  that  well-wooing  sun; 
The  lark  was  lost  in  him;  cold  springs  had  run 
To  warm  their  chilliest  bubbles  in  the  grass; 
Man's  voice  was  on  the  mountains;  and  the  mass 


EXAMPLES  OP  NATURE-POETRY        217 

Of  nature's  lives  and  wonders  puls'd  tenfold. 
To  feel  this  sun-rise  and  its  glories  old. 

The  freshness  and  music  and  felicity  of  the  first  two 
lines  are  nothing  less  than  Shakespearean:  in  the  rest 
note  with  how  true  an  instinct  the  poet  evokes  the 
operant  magic  and  living  activities  of  the  dawn,  siagle 
iQstances  first  and  then  in  a  sudden  outburst  the  sum 
and  volume  of  them  all:  how  he  avoids  word-paintrag  - 
and  palette-work,  leaving  all  merely  visible  beauties, 
the  stationary  world  of  colours  and  forms,  as  they 
should  be  left,  to  the  painter,  and  dealing,  as  poetry 
alone  is  able  to  deal,  with  those  delights  which  are  felt 
and  divined  rather  than  seen,  dehghts  which  the  poet 
instiactively  attributes  to  nature  as  though  she  were 
as  sentient  as  himself.  It  is  like  Keats  here  so  to  place 
and  lead  up  to  the  word  'old'  as  to  make  it  pregnant 
with  all  the  meanings  which  it  bore  to  him:  that  is 
with  all  the  wonder  and  romance  of  ancient  Greece, 
and  at  the  same  time  with  a  sense  of  awe,  like  that 
expressed  in  the  opening  chorus  of  Goethe's  Faicst,  at 
nature's  eternal  miracle  of  the  sun  still  rising  'glorious 
as  on  creation's  day.' 

It  is  interesting  to  note  how  above  all  other  nature- 
images  Keats,  whose  blood,  when  his  faculties  were  at 
their  highest  tension,  was  always  apt  to  be  heated  even 
to  fever-point,  prefers  those  of  nature's  coolness  and 
refreshment.  Here  are  two  or  three  out  of  a  score  of 
instances.  Endymion  tells  how  he  had  been  gazing  at 
the  face  of  his  imknown  love  smiling  at  him  from  the 
well: — 

I  started  up,  when  lo  !  refreshfully. 
There  came  upon  my  face  in  plenteous  showers 
Dew-drops,  and  dewy  buds,  and  leaves,  and  flowers. 
Wrapping  all  objects  from  my  smothered  sight. 
Bathing  my  spirit  in  a  new  delight. 

Coming  to  a  place  where  a  brook  issues  from  a  cave, 
he  says  to  himself — 

Tis  the  grot 
Of  Proserpine,  when  Hell,  obscure  and  hot. 


218      NATURE  AND  THE  GREEK  SPIRIT 

Doth  her  resign;  and  where  her  tender  hands 
She  dabbles  on  the  cool  and  sluicy  sands: 

A  little  later,  and 

Now  he  is  sitting  by  a  shady  spring, 

And  elbow-deep  with  feverous  fingering,  J 

Stems  the  upbursting  cold. 

For  many  passages  where  the  magic  of  nature  is 
mingled  instinctively  and  inseparably  with  the  magic 
of  Greek  mythology,  the  prayer  of  Endymion  to  Cynthia 
above  quoted  (p.  210)  may  serve  as  a  sample:  and  all 
readers  of  poetry  know  the  famous  lines  where  the 
beautiful  evocation  of  a  natural  scene  melts  into  one, 
more  beautiful  still,  of  a  scene  of  ancient  life  and  worship 
which  comes  floated  upon  the  poet's  inner  vision  by  an 
imagined  strain  of  music  from  across  the  sea: — 

It  seem'd  he  flew,  the  way  so  easy  was; 

And  like  a  new-born  spirit  did  he  pass 

Through  the  green  evening  quiet  in  the  sun, 

O'er  many  a  heath,  through  many  a  woodland  dun, 

Through  buried  paths,  where  sleepy  twilight  dreams 

The  summer  time  away.     One  track  unseams 

A  wooded  cleft,  and,  far  away,  the  blue 

Of  ocean  fades  upon  him;  then,  anew. 

He  sinks  adown  a  solitary  glen. 

Where  there  was  never  sound  of  mortal  men. 

Saving,  perhaps,  some  snow-light  cadences 

Melting  to  silence,  when  upon  the  breeze 

Some  holy  bark  let  forth  an  anthem  sweet. 

To  cheer  itself  to  Delphi.^ 

Often  in  thus  conjuring  up  visions  of  the  classic  past, 
Keats  effects  true  master  strokes  of  imaginative  con- 
centration. Do  we  not  feel  half  the  romance  of  the 
Odyssey,  with  the  spell  that  is  in  the  sound  of  the 

*  The  flaw  here  is  of  course  the  use  of  the  forced  rime-word  'unseam.' 
The  only  authority  for  the  word  is  Shakespeare,  who  uses  it  in  Macbeth, 
in  a  sufficiently  different  sense  and  context — 

'Till  he  unseam'd  him  from  the  nave  to  the  chaps.' 

The  vision  in  Keats's  mind  was  probably  of  a  track  dividing,  or  as  it  wer© 
ripping  apart,  the  two  sides  of  a  valley. 


GREEK  MYTHOLOGY  REVITALISED       219 

vowelled  place-names  of  Grecian  story,  and  the  breathing 
mystery  of  moonlight  falling  on  magic  islands  of  the 
sea,  distilled  into  the  one  line — 

Aeaea's  isle  was  wondering  at  the  moon  ? 

And  again  in  the  pair  of  lines — 

Like  old  Deucalion  mountain'd  o'er  the  flood 
Or  blind  Orion  hungry  for  the  mom, 

do  not  the  two  figm-es  evoked  rise  before  us  full-charged 
each  with  the  vital  significance  of  his  story?  Mr  de 
Selincourt  is  no  doubt  right  in  suggesting  that  in  the 
Orion  line  Keats^s  vision  has  been  stimulated  by  the 
print  from  that  picture  of  Poussin^s  which  Hazlitt  has 
described  in  so  rich  a  strain  of  eulogy. 

One  of  the  great  symptoms  of  returning  vitality  in 
the  imagination  of  Europe,  as  the  eighteenth  century 
passed  into  the  nineteenth,  was  its  re-awakening  to  the 
significance  and  beauty  of  the  Greek  mythology.  For 
a  hundred  years  and  more  the  value  of  that  mythology 
for  the  human  spirit  had  been  forgotten.  There  never 
had  been  a  time  when  the  names  of  the  ancient,  especially 
the  Roman,  gods  and  goddesses  were  used  so  often  in 
poetry,  but  simply  in  cold  obedience  to  tradition  and 
convention;  merely  as  part  of  the  accepted  mode  of 
speech  of  persons  classically  educated,  and  with  no 
more  living  significance  than  belonged  to  the  trick  of 
personifying  abstract  forces  and  ideas  by  putting  capital 
initials  to  their  names.  So  far  as  concerned  any  real 
effect  upon  men's  minds,  it  was  tacitly  understood  and 
accepted  that  the  Greek  mythology  was  ^  dead.'  As  if  it 
could  ever  die;  as  if  the  ^fair  humanities  of  old  religion,' 
in  passing  out  of  the  transitory  state  of  things  believed 
into  the  state  of  things  remembered  and  cherished  in 
imagination,  had  not  put  on  a  second  life  more  enduring 
and  more  fruitful  than  the  first.  Faiths,  as  faiths, 
perish  one  after  another;  but  each  in  passiag  away 
bequeaths  for  the  enrichment  of  the  after-world  whatever 
elements  it  has  contained  of  imaginative  or  moral  truth 
or  beauty.     The  polytheism  of  ancient  Greece,  embody- 


220  ITS  PREVIOUS  DEADNESS 

ing  the  instinctive  effort  of  the  brightliest  gifted  human 
race  to  explain  its  earHest  experiences  of  nature  and 
civilisation,  of  the  thousand  moral  and  material  forces, 
cruel  or  kindly,  which  environ  and  control  the  life  of 
man  on  earth,  is  rich  beyond  measure  in  such  elements; 
and  if  the  modern  world  at  any  time  fails  to  value  them, 
it  is  the  modern  mind  which  is  in  so  far  dead  and  not 
they.  Some  words  of  Johnson's  written  forty  years 
before  Keats's  time  may  help  us  to  realise  the  fidl  depth 
of  the  deadness  from  which  in  this  respect  it  had  to  be 
awakened : — 

He  (Waller)  borrows  too  many  of  his  sentiments  and  illustra- 
tions from  the  old  Mythology,  for  which  it  is  in  vain  to  plead  the 
example  of  ancient  poets:  the  deities,  which  they  introduced 
so  frequently,  were  considered  as  realities,  so  far  as  to  be  received 
by  the  imagination,  whatever  sober  reason  might  even  then 
determine.  But  of  these  images  time  has  tarnished  the  splendour. 
A  fiction,  not  only  detected  but  despised,  can  never  afford  a 
solid  basis  to  any  position,  though  sometimes  it  may  furnish 
a  transient  allusion,  or  slight  illustration. 

To  rescue  men's  minds  from  this  mode  of  deadness  was 
part  of  the  work  of  the  English  poetical  revival  of  1800 
and  onwards,  and  Keats  was  the  poet  who  has  contrib- 
uted most  to  the  task.  Wordsworth  could  understand 
and  expound  the  spirit  of  Grecian  myths,  and  on  occasion, 
as  in  his  cry  for  a  sight  of  Proteus  and  a  sound  of  old 
Triton's  horn,  could  for  a  moment  hanker  after  its 
revival.  Shelley  could  feel  and  write  of  Apollo  and  Pan 
and  Proserpine,  of  Alpheus  and  Arethusa,  with  ardent 
delight  ^-nd  lyric  emotion.  But  it  was  the  gift  of  Keats 
to  make  live  by  imagination,  whether  in  few  words  or 
many,  every  ancient  fable  that  came  up  in  his  mind. 
The  couple  of  lines  telling  of  the  song  with  which  Peona 
tries  to  soothe  her  brother's  pining  are  a  perfect 
example  alike  of  appropriate  verbal  music  and  of 
imagination  following  out  a  classic  myth,  that  of  the 
birth  and  nurture  of  Pan,  from  a  mere  hint  to  its 
recesses  and  finding  the  human  beauty  and  tenderness 
that  lurk  there : — 


POETRY  OF  LOVE  AND  WAR  221 

'Twas  a  lay 
More  subtle  cadenced,  more  forest  wild 
Than  Dryope's  lone  lulling  of  her  child: 

Even  in  setting  before  us  so  trite  a  personification  as 
the  god  of  love,  Keats  manages  to  escape  the  traditional 
and  the  merely  decorative,  and  to  endow  him  with  a 
new  and  subtle  vitality — 

awfully  he  stands; 
A  sovereign  quell  is  in  his  waving  hands; 
No  sight  can  bear  the  lightning  of  his  bow; 
His  quiver  is  mysterious,  none  can  know 
What  themselves  think  of  it;  from  forth  his  eyes 
There  darts  strange  light  of  varied  hues  and  dyes: 
A  scowl  is  sometimes  on  his  brow,  but  who 
Look  full  upon  it  feel  anon  the  blue 
Of  his  fair  eyes  run  liquid  through  their  souls. 

Keats  in  one  place  defines  his  purpose  in  his  poem, 
if  only  he  can  find  strength  to  carry  it  out,  as  a 

striving  to  uprear 
Love's  standard  on  the  battlements  of  song. 

His  actual  love  scenes,  as  we  have  said,  are  the  weakest, 
his  ideal  invocations  to  and  celebrations  of  love  among 
the  strongest,  things  in  the  poem.  One  of  these,  already 
quoted,  comes  near  the  end  of  the  first  book:  the 
second  book  opens  with  another:  in  the  third  book 
the  incident  of  the  moonlight  spangling  the  surface  of 
the  sea  and  penetrating  thence  to  the  xmder-sea  caverns 
where  Endymion  lies  languishing  is  used  to  point  an 
essential  moral  of  the  narrative: — 

O  love !  how  potent  hast  thou  been  to  teach 
Strange  journey ings  !     Wherever  beauty  dwells, 
In  gulph  or  aerie,  mountains  or  deep  dells. 
In  light,  in  gloom,  in  star  or  blazing  sun. 
Thou  pointest  out  the  way,  and  straight  'tis  won. 

When  the  poet  interrupts  for  a  passing  moment  his 
tale  of  the  might  and  mysteries  of  love,  celestial  or  human, 
and  turns  to  images  of  war,  we  find  him  able  to  condense 


222  DRAMATIC  PROMISE 

the  whole  tragedy  of  the  sack  of  Troy  into  three  potent 
lines, — 

The  woes  of  Troy,  towers  smothering  o'er  their  blaze, 
Stiff-holden  shields,  far-piercing  spears,  keen  blades, 
Struggling,  and  blood,  and  shrieks.  j 

From  a  passage  like  the  following  any  reasonably 
sympathetic  reader  of  Keats's  day,  running  through 
the  poem  to  find  what  manner  and  variety  of  promise 
it  might  contain,  should  have  augured  well  of 
another  kind  of  power,  the  dramatic  and  ironic,  to 
be  developed  in  due  time.  The  speaker  is  the 
detested  witch  Circe  uttering  the  doom  of  her  revolted 
lover  Glaucus : — 

*  Ha !  ha !  Sir  Dainty !  there  must  be  a  nurse 
Made  of  rose  leaves  and  thistledown,  express. 
To  cradle  thee,  my  sweet,  and  lull  thee:  yes, 
I  am  too  flinty-hard  for  thy  nice  touch : 
My  tenderest  squeeze  is  but  a  giant's  clutch. 
So,  fairy-thing,  it  shall  have  lullabies 
Unheard  of  yet:  and  it  shall  still  its  cries 
Upon  some  breast  more  lily-feminine. 
Oh,  no — it  shall  not  pine,  and  pine,  and  pine 
More  than  one  pretty,  trifling  thousand  years. 

.  .  .  Mark  me !    Thou  hast  thews 
Immortal,  for  thou  art  of  heavenly  race: 
But  such  a  love  is  mine,  that  here  I  chase 
Eternally  away  from  thee  all  bloom 
Of  youth,  and  destine  thee  towards  a  tomb. 
Hence  shalt  thou  quickly  to  the  watery  vast; 
And  there,  ere  many  days  be  overpast, 
Disabled  age  shall  seize  thee:  and  even  then 
Thou  shalt  not  go  the  way  of  aged  men; 
But  live  and  wither,  cripple  and  still  breathe 
Ten  hundred  years :  which  gone,  I  then  bequeath 
Thy  fragile  bones  to  unknown  burial. 
Adieu,  sweet  love,  adieu ! ' 

A  vein  very  characteristic  of  Keats  at  this  stage  of 
his  mind's  growth  is  that  of  figurative  confession  or 
self-revelation.  Many  passages  in  Endymion  give 
poetical  expression  to  the  same  alternating  moods  of 


COMPARISON  WITH  MODELS  223 

ambition  and  humility,  of  exhilaration,  depression, 
or  apathy,  which  he  confides  to  his  friends  in  his 
letters.  One  of  the  most  striking  and  original  of 
these  pieces  of  figurative  psychology  studied  from  his 
own  moods  is  the  description  of  the  Cave  of  Quietude 
in  Book  IV:— 

There  lies  a  den. 
Beyond  the  seeming  confines  of  the  space 
Made  for  the  soul  to  wander  in  and  trace 
Its  own  existence,  of  remotest  glooms. 
Dark  regions  are  around  it,  where  the  tombs 
Of  buried  griefs  the  spirit  sees,  but  scarce 
One  hour  doth  linger  weeping,  for  the  pierce 
Of  new-bom  woe  it  feels  more  inly  smart: 
And  in  these  regions  many  a  venom'd  dart 
At  random  flies;  they  are  the  proper  home 
Of  every  ill :  the  man  is  yet  to  come 
Who  hath  not  journeyed  in  this  native  hell. 
But  few  have  ever  felt  how  calm  and  well 
Sleep  may  be  had  in  that  deep  den  of  all. 
There  anguish  does  not  sting;  nor  pleasure  pall: 
Woe-hurricanes  beat  ever  at  the  gate. 
Yet  all  is  still  within  and  desolate. 

.  .  .  Enter  none 
Who  strive  therefore:  on  the  sudden  it  is  won. 

To  the  student  of  Endymion  there  are  few  things 
more  interesting  than  to  observe  Keats's  technical  and 
spiritual  relations  to  his  Elizabethan  models  in  those 
places  where  he  has  one  or  another  of  them  manifestly 
in  remembrance.  Here  is  the  passage  in  Sandys's 
Ovid  which  tells  how  Cybele,  the  Earth-Mother,  punished 
the  pair  of  lovers  Hippomenes  and  Atalanta  for  the 
pollution  of  her  sanctuary  by  turning  them  into  lions 
and  yoking  them  to  her  car: — 

The  Mother,  crown'd 
With  towers,  had  struck  them  to  the  Stygian  sound. 
But  that  she  thought  that  punishment  too  small. 
When  yellow  manes  on  their  smooth  shoulders  fall; 
Their  arms,  to  legs;   their  fingers  turn  to  nails; 
Their  breasts  of  wondrous  strength:  their  tufted  tails 
Whisk  up  the  dust;  their  looks  are  full  of  dread; 
For  speech  they  roar:  the  woods  become  their  bed. 


224  SANDYS^S  OVID 

These  Lions,  fear'd  by  others,  Cybel  checks 

With  curbing  bits,  and  yokes  their  stubborn  necks. 

This  is  a  tjrpical  example  of  Ovid's  brilliantly  clever, 
quite  unromantic,  unsurprised,  and  as  it  were  unblinking 
way  of  detailing  the  marvels  of  an  act  of  transformation. 
Keats's  recollection  of  it — and  probably  also  of  a  certain 
engraving  after  a  Roman  altar-relief  of  Cybele  and  her 
yoked  lions — ^inspires  a  vision  of  intense  imaginative  life 
expressed  in  verse  of  a  noble  solemnity  and  sonority: — 

Forth  from  a  rugged  arch,  in  the  dusk  below. 
Came  mother  Cybele !  alone — alone — 
In  sombre  chariot;  dark  foldings  thrown 
About  her  majesty,  and  front  death-pale. 
With  turrets  crown'd.     Four  maned  lions  hale 
The  sluggish  wheels;  solemn  their  toothed  maws. 
Their  surly  eyes  brow-hidden,  heavy  paws 
Uplifted  drowsily,  and  nervy  tails 
Cowering  their  tawny  brushes.     Silent  sails 
This  shadowy  queen  athwart,  and  faints  away 
In  another  gloomy  arch. 

The  four  lions  instead  of  two  must  be  a  whim  of  Keats's 
imagination,  and  finds  no  authority  either  from  Ovid 
or  from  ancient  sculpture.  Should  any  reader  wish  to 
pursue  farther  the  comparison  between  Ovid  in  the 
Metamorphoses  and  Keats  in  Endymion,  let  him  turn 
to  the  passage  of  Ovid  where  Polyphemus  tells  Galatea 
what  rustic  treasures  he  will  lavish  upon  her  if  she  will 
be  his, — ^the  same  passage  from  which  is  derived  the 
famous  song  in  Handel's  Ads  and  Galatea:  let  him  turn 
to  this  and  compare  it  with  the  list  of  similar  delights 
offered  by  Endymion  to  the  Indian  maiden  when  he 
is  bent  on  forgoing  his  dreams  of  a  celestial  union  for 
her  sake,  and  he  will  see  how  they  are  dematerialized 
and  refined  yet  at  the  same  time  made  richer  in  colour 
and  enchantment. 

But  let  us  for  our  purpose  rather  take,  as  illus- 
trating the  relations  of  Keats  to  his  classic  and  Eliza- 
bethan sources,  two  of  the  incidental  lyrics  in  his  poem. 
There   are  four   such   lyrics   in   Endymion   altogether. 


HYMN  TO  PAN:    CHAPMAN  225 

Two  of  them  are  of  small  account, — the  hymn  to 
Neptune  and  Venus  at  the  end  of  the  third  book,  and 
the  song  of  the  Constellations  in  the  middle  of  the 
fourth.  The  other  two,  the  hymn  to  Pan  in  Book  I 
and  the  song  of  the  Indian  maiden  in  Book  IV,  are 
among  Keats's  very  finest  achievements.  The  hymn 
to  Pan  is  especially  interesting  in  comparison  with  two 
of  Keats's  Elizabethan  sources.  Chapman's  translation 
of  the  Homeric  hymn  and  Ben  Jonson's  original  hymns 
in  his  masque  of  Pan^s  Anniversary.  Here  is  part  of 
the  Homeric  hymn  according  to  Chapman: — 

Sing,  Muse,  this  chief  of  Hennes*  love-got  joys. 

Goat-footed,  two-hornM,  amorous  of  noise. 

That  through  the  fair  greens,  all  adorn'd  with  trees. 

Together  goes  with  Nymphs,  whose  nimble  knees 

Can  every  dance  foot,  that  affect  to  scale 

The  most  inaccessible  tops  of  all 

Uprightest  rocks,  and  ever  use  to  call 

On  Pan,  the  bright-haired  God  of  pastoral; 

Who  yet  is  lean  and  loveless,  and  doth  owe 

By  lot  all  loftiest  mountains  crown'd  with  snow; 

All  tops  of  hills,  and  cliffy  highnesses. 

All  sylvan  copses,  and  the  fortresses 

Of  thorniest  queaches  here  and  there  doth  rove. 

And  sometimes,  by  allurement  of  his  love. 

Will  wade  the  wat'ry  softnesses.     Sometimes 

(In  quite  opf)os'd  capricdos)  he  climbs 

The  hardest  rocks,  and  highest,  every  way 

Running  their  ridges.     Often  will  convey 

Himself  up  to  a  watch-tow'r's  top,  where  sheep 

Have  their  observance.     Oft  through  hills  as  steep 

His  goats  he  runs  upon,  and  never  rests. 

Then  turns  he  head,  and  flies  on  savage  beasts. 

Mad  of  their  slaughters  .  .  . 

(When  Hesperus  calls  to  fold  the  flocks  of  men) 

From  the  green  closets  of  his  loftiest  reeds 

He  rushes  forth,  and  joy  with  song  he  feeds. 

When,  under  shadow  of  their  motions  set. 

He  plays  a  verse  forth  so  profoundly  sweet, 

As  not  the  bird  that  in  the  flow'ry  sprrug. 

Amidst  the  leaves  set,  makes  the  thickets  ring 

Of  her  sour  sorrows,  sweetened  with  her  song, 

Runs  her  divisions  varied  so  and  strong. 


226  BEN  JONSON 

And  here  are  two  of  the  most  characteristic  strophes 
from  Ben  Jonson's  hymns: — 

Pan  is  our  all,  by  him  we  breathe,  we  live. 

We  move,  we  are;  'tis  he  our  lambs  doth  rear. 
Our  flocks  doth  bless,  and  from  the  store  doth  givej 

The  warm  and  finer  fleeces  that  we  wear.  C 

He  keeps  away  all  heats  and  colds. 

Drives  all  diseases  from  our  folds: 

Makes  every  where  the  spring  to  dwell. 

The  ewes  to  feed,  their  udders  swell; 

But  if  he  frown,  the  sheep  (alas) 

The  shepherds  wither,  and  the  grass. 
Strive,  strive  to  please  him  then  by  still  increasing  thus 
The  rites  are  due  to  him,  who  doth  all  right  for  us. 

Great  Pan,  the  father  of  our  peace  and  pleasure. 
Who  giv'st  us  all  this  leisure. 

Hear  what  thy  hallowed  troop  of  herdsmen  pray 
For  this  their  holy-day. 

And  how  their  vows  to  thee  they  in  Lycseum  pay. 

So  may  our  ewes  receive  the  mounting  rams. 

And  we  bring  thee  the  earliest  of  our  lambs: 

So  may  the  first  of  all  our  fells  be  thine. 

And  both  the  breastning  of  our  goats  and  kine. 
As  thou  our  folds  dost  still  secure. 
And  keep'st  our  fountains  sweet  and  pure, 
Driv'st  hence  the  wolf,  the  tod,  the  brock. 
Or  other  vermin  from  the  flock. 

That  we  preserved  by  thee,  and  thou  observed  by  us. 

May  both  live  safe  in  shade  of  thy  lov'd  Maenalus. 

Comparing  these  strophes  with  the  hymn  in  Endymion, 
we  shall  realize  how  the  EHzabethan  pastoral  spirit, 
compounded  as  it  was  of  native  EngHsh  love  of  country 
pleasures  and  Renaissance  delight  in  classic  poetry, 
emerged  after  near  two  centuries'  occultation  to  reappear 
in  the  poetry  of  Keats,  but  wonderfully  strengthened 
in  imaginative  reach  and  grasp,  richer  and  more  romantic 
both  in  the  delighted  sense  of  nature's  blessings  and 
activities  and  in  the  awed  apprehension  of  a  vast  mystery 
behind  them.  The  sense  of  such  mystery  is  nowhere 
else  expressed  by  Keats  with  such  brooding  inwardness 
and  humbleness  as  where  he  invokes  Pan  no  longer  as 


THE  HYMN  IN  ENDYMION  227 

a  shepherd^s  god  but  as  a  symbol  of  the  World-All. 
Wordsworth,  when  Keats  at  the  request  of  friends 
read  the  piece  to  him,  could  see,  or  would  own  to  seeing, 
nothing  in  it  but  a  'pretty  piece  of  paganism,'  though 
indeed  in  the  more  profoundly  felt  and  imagined  Hues, 
such  as  those  with  which  the  first  and  fifth  strophes 
open,  the  inspiration  can  be  traced  in  great  part  to  the 
influence  of  Wordsworth  himself: — 


O  Thou,  whose  mighty  palace  roof  doth  hang 
From  jagged  tnmks,  and  overshadoweth 
Eternal  whispers,  glooms,  the  birth,  life,  death 
Of  unseen  flowers  in  heavy  peacefulness; 
Who  lov'st  to  see  the  hamadryads  dress 
Their  ruffled  locks  where  meeting  hazels  darken; 
And  through  whole  solemn  hours  dost  sit,  and  hearken 
The  dreary  melody  of  bedded  reeds — 
In  desolate  places,  where  dank  moisture  breeds 
The  pipy  hemlock  to  strange  overgrowth; 
Bethinking  thee,  how  melancholy  loth 
Thou  wast  to  lose  fair  Syrinx — do  thou  now. 
By  thy  love's  milky  brow ! 
By  all  the  trembling  mazes  that  she  ran. 
Hear  us,  great  Pan ! 

O  thou,  for  whose  soul-soothing  quiet,  turtles 
Passion  their  voices  cooingly  'mong  myrtles. 
What  time  thou  wanderest  at  eventide 
Through  sunny  meadows,  that  outskirt  the  side 
Of  thine  enmossed  realms:  O  thou,  to  whom 
Broad  leaved  fig  trees  even  now  foredoom 
Their  ripen'd  fruitage;  yellow  girted  bees 
Their  golden  honeycombs;  our  village  leas 
Their  fairest  blossom'd  beans  and  poppied  com; 
The  chuckling  linnet  its  five  young  unborn. 
To  sing  for  thee;  low  creeping  strawberries 
Their  summer  coolness;  pent  up  butterflies 
Their  freckled  wings;  yea,  the  fresh  budding  year 
All  its  completions — be  quickly  near. 
By  every  wind  that  nods  the  mountain  pine, 
O  forester  divine ! 

Thou,  to  whom  every  faun  and  satyr  flies 
For  willing  service;  whether  to  siuprise 


228      'A  PRETTY  PIECE  OF  PAGANISM' 

The  squatted  hare  while  in  half  sleeping  fit; 

Or  upward  ragged  precipices  flit 

To  save  poor  lambkins  from  the  eagle's  maw; 

Or  by  mysterious  enticement  draw 

Bewildered  shepherds  to  their  path  again; 

Or  to  tread  breathless  round  the  frothy  main,       J 

And  gather  up  all  fancifuUest  shells 

For  thee  to  tumble  into  Naiads'  cells. 

And  being  hidden,  laugh  at  their  out-peeping; 

Or  to  delight  thee  with  fantastic  leaping, 

The  while  they  pelt  each  other  on  the  crown 

With  silvery  oak  apples,  and  fir  cones  brown — 

By  all  the  echoes  that  about  thee  ring. 

Hear  us,  O  satyr  king ! 

O  Hearkener  to  the  loud  clapping  shears. 
While  ever  and  anon  to  his  shorn  peers 
A  ram  goes  bleating:  Winder  of  the  horn. 
When  snouted  wild-boars  routing  tender  com 
Anger  our  huntsmen:  Breather  round  our  farms. 
To  keep  off  mildews,  and  all  weather  harms : 
Strange  ministrant  of  undescribed  sounds, 
That  come  a  swooning  over  hollow  grounds. 
And  wither  drearily  on  barren  moors  :^ 
Dread  opener  of  the  mysterious  doors 
Leading  to  universal  knowledge — see. 
Great  son  of  Dryope, 

The  many  that  are  come  to  pay  their  vows 
With  leaves  about  their  brows  I 

Be  still  the  unimaginable  lodge 
For  solitary  thinkings;  such  as  dodge 
Conception  to  the  very  bourne  of  heaven, 
Then  leave  the  naked  brain;  be  still  the  leaven. 
That  spreading  in  this  dull  and  clodded  earth 
Gives  it  a  touch  ethereal — a  new  birth: 
Be  still  a  symbol  of  immensity; 
A  firmament  reflected  in  a  sea; 
An  element  filling  the  space  between; 
An  unknown — but  no  more:  we  humbly  screen 

^  'All  the  strange,  mysterious  and  unaccountable  sounds  which  were 
heard  in  solitary  places,  were  attributed  to  Pan,  the  God  of  rural  scenerjr' 
(Baldwin's  Pantheon,  ed.  1806,  p.  104).  Keats  possessed  a  copy  of  this 
well-felt  and  well-written  little  primer  of  mythology,  by  William  Godwin 
the  philosopher  writing  under  the  pseudonym  Edward  Baldwin;  and  the 
above  is  only  one  of  several  suggestions  directly  due  to  it  which  are  to  be 
found  in  his  poetry. 


SONG  OF  THE  INDIAN  MAIDEN        229 

With  uplift  hands  our  foreheads,  lowly  bending. 
And  giving  out  a  shout  most  heaven  rending, 
Conjure  thee  to  receive  our  humble  Paean, 
Upon  thy  Mount  Lycean ! 

The  song  of  the  Indian  maiden  in  the  fourth  book 
is  in  a  very  different  key  from  this,  more  strikingly 
original  in  form  and  conception,  and  but  for  a  weak 
opening  and  one  or  two  flaws  of  taste  would  be  a  master- 
piece. Keats's  later  and  more  famous  lyrics,  though 
they  have  fewer  faults,  yet  do  not,  to  my  mind  at  least, 
show  a  command  over  such  various  sources  of  imaginative 
and  musical  effect,  or  touch  so  thrillingly  so  many 
chords  of  the  spirit.  A  mood  of  tender  irony  and 
wistful  pathos  like  that  of  the  best  Elizabethan  love- 
songs;  a  sense  as  keen  as  Heine's  of  the  immemorial 
romance  of  India  and  the  East;  a  power  like  that  of 
Coleridge,  and  perhaps  partly  caught  from  him,  of 
evoking  the  remotest  weird  and  beautiful  associations 
almost  with  a  word;  clear  visions  of  Greek  beauty 
and  wild  wood-notes  of  northern  imagination;  aU 
these  elements  come  here  commingled,  yet  in  a  strain 
perfectly  individual.  Keats  calls  the  piece  a  ^  roundelay,' 
— a  form  which  it  only  so  far  resembles  that  its  opening 
measures  are  repeated  at  the  close.  It  begins  by  in- 
voking and  questioning  sorrow  in  a  series  of  dreamy 
musical  stanzas  of  which  the  imagery  embodies,  a 
little  redundantly  and  confusedly,  the  idea  expressed 
elsewhere  by  Keats  with  greater  perfection,  that  it  is 
Sorrow  which  confers  upon  beautiful  things  their 
richest  beauty.  From  these  the  song  passes  to  tell 
what  has  happened  to  the  singer: — 

To  Sorrow, 

I  bade  good-morrow. 
And  thought  to  leave  her  far  away  behind; 

But  cheerly,  cheerly, 

She  loves  me  dearly; 
She  is  so  constant  to  me,  and  so  kind: 

I  would  deceive  her 

And  so  leave  her. 
But  ah !  she  is  so  constant  and  so  kind. 


230  THE  TRIUMPH  OF  BACCHUS 

Beneath  my  palm  tree,  by  the  river  side, 
I  sat  a  weeping:  in  the  whole  world  wide 
There  was  no  one  to  ask  me  why  I  wept, — 

And  so  I  kept 
Brimming  the  water-lily  cups  with  tears 

Cold  as  my  fears.  \ 

Beneath  my  palm  trees,  by  the  river  side,  -^ 

I  sat  a  weeping:  what  enamour' d  bride,  ^ 

Cheated  by  shadowy  wooer  from  the  clouds. 

But  hides  and  shrouds 
Beneath  dark  palm  trees  by  a  river  side  ? 

It  is  here  that  we  seem  to  catch  an  echo,  varied  and 
new-modulated  but  in  no  sense  weakened,  from  Cole- 
ridge's Kuhla  KhaUj — 

A  savage  place,  as  holy  as  enchanted 

As  e'er  beneath  the  waning  moon  was  haunted 

By  woman  wailing  for  her  demon  lover. 

Then,  with  another  change  of  measure  comes  the 
deserted  maiden's  tale  of  the  irruption  of  Bacchus  on 
his  march  from  India;  and  then,  arranged  as  if  for  music, 
the  challenge  of  the  maiden  to  the  Maenads  and  satyrs 
and  their  choral  answers: — 

*  Whence  came  ye,  merry  Damsels !    Whence  came  ye  I 
So  many  and  so  many,  and  such  glee  ? 

Why  have  ye  left  your  bowers  desolate. 
Your  lutes,  and  gentler  fate?' 

*  We  follow  Bacchus !  good  or  ill  betide. 

We  dance  before  him  thorough  kingdoms  wide: 
Come  hither,  lady  fair,  and  joined  be 
To  our  wild  minstrelsy ! ' 

'Whence  came  ye  jolly  Satyrs !    Whence  came  ye  1 

So  many,  and  so  many,  and  such  glee  ? 

Why  have  ye  left  your  forest  haunts,  why  left 

Your  nuts  in  oak-tree  cleft  ? ' 
*For  wine,  for  wine  we  left  our  kernel  tree; 
For  wine  we  left  our  heath,  and  yellow  brooms. 

And  cold  mushrooms; 
For  wine  we  follow  Bacchus  through  the  earth; 
Great  God  of  breathless  cups  and  chirping  mirth  1 
Come  hither,  lady  fair,  and  joined  be 

To  our  mad  minstrelsy  I ' 


P 

Qh 

-J* 

■'-' 

<u 

ni 

V 

CJ 

n 

-d 

c 

a: 

'T-; 

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< 

< 

•^ 

j::: 

?! 

U 

o 

O 

^ 

A  COMPOSITE:  ITS  SOURCES  231 

*  Over  wide  streams  and  mountains  great  we  went, 
And  save  when  Bacchus  kept  his  ivy  tent, 
Onward  the  tiger  and  the  leopard  pants, 

With  Asian  elephants: 
Onward  these  myriads — with  song  and  dance. 
With  zebras  striped,  and  sleek  Arabians'  prance. 
Web-footed  alligators,  crocodiles. 
Bearing  upon  their  scaly  backs,  in  files. 
Plump  infant  laughers  mimicking  the  coil 
Of  seamen,  and  stout  galley-rowers'  toil : 
With  toying  oars  and  silken  sails  they  glide. 

Nor  care  for  wind  and  tide.' 

It  is  usually  said  that  this  description  of  Bacchus  and 
his  rout  was  suggested  by  Titian's  famous  picture  of 
Bacchus  and  Ariadne  (after  Catullus)  which  is  now  in 
the  National  Gallery,  and  which  Severn  took  Keats 
to  see  when  it  was  exhibited  at  the  British  Institu- 
tion in  1816.  But  this  will  accomit  for  a  part  at  most 
of  Keats's  vision.  Tiger  and  leopard  panting  along 
with  Asian  elephants  on  the  march  are  not  present  in 
that  picture,  nor  anything  like  them.  Keats  might 
have  found  suggestions  for  them  in  the  text  both  of 
Godwin's  Httle  handbook  just  quoted  and  in  Spence's 
Polymetis:  but  it  would  have  been  much  more  like 
him  to  work  from  something  seen  with  his  eyes:  and 
these  animals,  with  Indian  prisoners  mounted  on  the 
elephants,  are  invariable  features  of  the  triumphal 
processions  of  Bacchus  through  India  as  represented 
on  a  certain  well-known  type  of  ancient  sarcophagus. 
From  direct  sight  of  such  sarcophagus  reUefs  or  prints 
after  such  Keats,  I  feel  sure,  must  have  taken  them,^  while 
the  children  mounted  on  crocodiles  may  have  been  drawn 
from  the  plinth  of  the  famous  ancient  recumbent  statue 
of  the  Nile,  and  the  pigmy  rowers,  in  all  likelihood, 

1  Two  classes  of  sarcophaguses  are  concerned,  those  figuring  the  triumph 
of  Bacchus  and  Hercules  with  their  Indian  captives,  and  those  which  show 
the  march  of  Silenus  and  his  rout  of  fauns  and  maenads.  Now  it  so 
happens  that  an  excellent  original  of  each  class,  and  with  them  also  a  fine 
Endymion  sarcophagus,  had  been  bought  by  the  Duke  of  Bedford  from 
the  Villa  Aldobrandini  in  1815  and  were  set  up  in  his  grand  new  gallery 
at  Wobum  five  years  later.  Where  they  were  housed  in  the  meanwhile 
is  not  recorded,  but  wherever  it  was  Haydon  could  easily  have  obtained 


232      ^ENGLISH  SCENERY  AND  DETAIL 

from  certain  reliefs  which  Keats  will  have  noticed  in 
the  Townley  collection  at  the  British  Museum:  so  that 
the  whole  brilliant  picture  is  a  composite  (as  we  shall 
see  later  was  the  case  with  the  Grecian  Urn)  which  had 
shaped  itself  from  various  sources  in  Keats's  imagination 
and  become  more  real  than  any  reality  to  his  mind's  eye. 
But  I  am  holding  up  the  reader,  with  this  digression 
as  to  sources,  from  the  fine  rush  of  verse  with  which 
the  lyric  sweeps  on  to  tell  how  the  singer  dropped  out 
of  the  train  of  Bacchus  to  wander  alone  into  the  Carian 
forest,  and  finally,  returning  to  the  opening  motive, 
ends  as  it  began  with  an  exquisite  strain  of  lovelorn 
pathos: — 

Come  then,  sorrow ! 

Sweetest  sorrow ! 
Like  an  own  babe  I  nurse  thee  on  my  breast: 

I  thought  to  leave  thee. 

And  deceive  thee, 
But  now  of  all  the  world  I  love  thee  best. 

There  is  not  one, 

No,  no,  not  one 
But  thee  to  comfort  a  poor  lonely  maid; 

Thou  art  her  mother 

And  her  brother. 
Her  playmate,  and  her  wooer  in  the  shade. 

An  intensely  vital  imaginative  feeling,  such  as  can 
afford  to  dispense  with  scholarship,  for  the  spirit  of 
Greek  and  Greco-Asiatic  myths  and  cults  inspires  these 
lyrics  respectively;  and  strangely  enough  the  result 
seems  in  neither  case  a  whit  impaired  by  the  fact  that 
the  nature-images  Keats  invokes  in  them  are  almost 
purely  English.  Bean-fields  in  blossom  and  poppies 
among  the  com,  hemlock  growing  in  moist  places  by 
the  brookside,  field  mushrooms  with  the  morning  dew 

access  to  them,  (the  Duke's  agent  in  the  purchase  having  been  also 
secretary  to  Lora  Elgin)  and  I  cannot  resist  the  conviction,  purely  conjectural 
as  it  is,  that  Keats  must  have  seen  them  in  Haydon's  companv  some  time 
in  the  winter  of  1816/17,  and  drawn  inspiration  from  them  both  in  this 
and  some  other  passages  of  Endymion.  The  Triumph  relief  is  the 
richest  extant  of  its  class,  especially  in  its  multitude  of  sporting  children: 
see  plate  opposite. 


INFLUENCE  OF  WORDSWORTH  233 

upon  them,  cowslips  and  strawberries  and  the  song  of 
linnets,  oak,  hazel  and  flowering  broom,  holly  trees 
smothered  from  view  under  the  summer  leafage  of  chest- 
nuts, these  are  the  things  of  nature  that  he  has  loved 
and  lived  with  from  a  child,  and  his  imagination  cannot 
help  importing  the  same  delights  not  only  into  the 
forest  haunts  of  Pan  but  into  the  regions  ranged  over 
by  Bacchus  with  his  train  of  yoked  tiger  and  panther, 
of  elephant,  crocodile  and  zebra. 

Contemporary  influences  as  well  as  Elizabethan  and 
Jacobean  are  naturally  discernible  in  the  poem.  The 
strongest  and  most  permeating  is  that  of  Wordsworth, 
not  so  much  to  be  traced  in  actual  echoes  of  his  words, 
though  these  of  course  occur,  as  in  adoptions  of  his 
general  spirit.  We  have  recognised  a  special  instance 
in  that  deep  and  brooding  sense  of  mystery,  of  'some- 
thing far  more  deeply  interfused,'  of  the  working  of  an 
unknown  spiritual  force  behind  appearances,  which 
finds  expression  in  the  hymn  to  Pan.  Endymion's 
prayer  to  Cynthia  from  underground  in  the  second 
book  will  be  found  to  run  definitely  and  closely  parallel 
with  Wordsworth's  description  of  the  huntress  Diana 
in  his  account  of  the  origin  of  Greek  myths  (see  above, 
pp.  125-6).  When  Keats  likens  the  many-tinted  mists 
enshrouding  the  litter  of  Sleep  to  the  fog  on  the  top  of 
Skiddaw  from  which  the  travellers  may         ' 

With  an  eye-guess  towards  some  pleasant  vale 
Descry  a  favourite  hamlet  faint  and  far, 

we  know  that  his  imagination  is  answering  to  a  stimulus 
supplied  by  Wordsworth.  But  it  is  for  the  under- 
current of  ethical  symbolism  in  Endymion  that  Keats 
will  have  owed  the  most  to  that  master.  Both  Shelley 
and  he  had  been  profoundly  impressed  by  the  reading 
of  The  Excursion,  published  when  Shelley  was  in  his 
twenty-second  year  and  Keats  in  his  nineteenth,  and 
each  in  his  own  way  had  taken  deeply  to  heart  Words- 
worth's inculcation,  both  in  that  poem  and  many 
others,  of  the  doctrine  that  a  poet  must  learn  to  go 


234  INFLUENCE  OF  SHELLEY 

out  of  himseK  and  to  live  and  feel  as  a  man  among 

J    fellow-men, — ^that  it  is  a  kind  of  spiritual  suicide  for 

him  to  attempt  to  live  apart  from  himian  sympathies, 

Housed  in  a  dream,  at  distance  from  the  Kind ! 

A  large  part  of  Endymion,  as  we  have  seen,  is  devotj^d 
to  the  symbolical  setting  forth  of  this  conviction.  pPor 
the  rest,  that  essential  contrast  between  the  mental 
processes  and  poetic  methods  of  the  elder  and  the 
^  yoimger  man  which  we  have  noted  in  discussing  Keats's 
first  volume  continues  to  strike  us  in  the  second.  In 
interpreting  the  relations  of  man  to  the  natural  world, 
i/  Wordsworth^s  poetry  is  intensely  personal  and  'sub- 
jective,' Keats's  intensely  impersonal  and  'objective.' 
Wordsworth  expounds,  Keats  evokes:  the  mind  of 
Wordsworth  works  by  strenuous  after-meditation  on 
his  experiences  of  life  and  nature  and  their  effect  upon 
his  own  soul  and  consciousness:  the  mind  of  Keats 
works  by  instantaneous  imaginative  participation, 
instinctive  and  self-oblivious,  in  natiu-e's  doings  and 
beings,  especially  those  which  make  for  human  refresh- 
ment and  delightTj 

The  second  contemporary  influence  to  be  considered 
is  that  of  Shelley.  Shelley's  AlastoTj  it  will  be  remem- 
bered, published  early  in  1816,  had  been  praised  by 
Hunt  in  The  Examiner  for  December  of  that  year,  and 
in  the  following  January  Himt  printed  in  the  same 
paper  Shelley's  Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty.  In  the 
course  of  that  same  December  and  January  Keats  had 
seen  a  good  deal  of  Shelley  at  Hunt's  and  taken  part 
with  him  in  many  talks  on  poetry.  It  is  certain  that 
Keats  read  and  was  impressed  by  Alastor:  doubtless 
he  also  read  the  Hymn.  How  much  did  either  or  both 
influence  him  in  the  composition  of  Endymion?  Mr 
Andrew  Bradley  thinks  he  sees  evidence  that  Alastor 
influenced  him  strongly.  That  poem  is  a  parable,  as 
Endymion  is,  of  the  adventures  of  a  poet's  soul;  and 
it  enforces,  as  much  of  Endymion  does,  the  doctrine 
that  a  poet   cannot  without  ruin  to  himself  live  in 


ENDYMION  AND  ALASTOR  235 

isolation  from  human  sjTiipathies.  But  there  the 
resemblance  between  the  two  conceptions  really  ends. 
In  Alastor  the  poet,  having  lived  in  solitary  communion 
'with  all  that  is  most  beautiful  and  august  in  nature 
and  in  human  thought  and  the  world's  past'  (the  words 
are  Shelley's  own  prose  simimary  of  the  imagined  experi- 
ences which  the  first  part  of  the  poem  relates  in  splendid 
verse),  is  suddenly  awakened,  by  a  love-vision  which 
comes  to  him  in  a  dream,  to  the  passionate  desire  of 
finding  and  mating  with  a  kindred  soul,  the  living 
counterpart  of  his  dream,  who  shall  share  with  him  the 
dehght  of  such  communion.  The  desire,  ever  imsatisfied, 
turns  all  his  former  joys  to  ashes,  and  drives  him  forth 
by  unheard-of  ways  through  monstrous  wildernesses 
imtil  he  pines  and  dies,  or  in  the  strained  Shelleyan 
phrase,  'Blasted  by  his  disappointment,  he  descends 
into  an  untimely  grave.'  The  essence  of  the  theme  is 
the  quest  of  the  poetic  soul  for  perfect  spiritual  sympathy 
and  its  failure  to  discover  what  it  seeks.  Shelley  does 
not  make  it  fully  clear  whether  the  ideal  of  his  poet's 
dream  is  a  purely  abstract  entity,  an  incarnation  of  the 
collective  response  which  he  hopes,  but  fails,  to  find 
from  his  fellow-creatures  at  large;  or  whether,  or  how 
far,  he  is  transcendentally  expressing  his  own  personal 
longing  for  an  ideally  sympathetic  soul-companion  in 
the  shape  of  woman.  Both  strains  no  doubt  enter  into 
his  conception;  so  far  as  the  private  strain  comes  in, 
many  passages  of  his  life  furnish  a  mournfully  ironic 
comment  on  his  dream.  But  in  any  case  his  conception 
is  fundamentally  different  from  that  of  Keats  in 
Endymion.  The  essence  of  Keats's  task  is  to  set  forth 
the  craving  of  the  poet  for  full  communion  with  the 
essential  spirit  of  Beauty  in  the  world,  and  the  discipline 
by  which  he  is  led,  through  the  exercise  of  the  active 
human  sympathies  and  the  toilsome  acquisition  of 
knowledge,  to  the  prosperous  and  beatific  achievement 
of  his  quest. 

It  is  rather  the  preface  to  Alastor  than  the  poem 
itself  which  we  can  trace  as  having  really  worked  in  the 


236    CORRESPONDENCES  AND  CONTRASTS 

mind  of  Keats.  In  it  the  evil  fate  of  those  who  shut 
themselves  out  from  human  sympathies  is  very  elo- 
quently set  forth;  in  a  passage  which  is  only  partly 
relevant  to  the  design  of  the  poem,  inasmuch  as  its 
warning  is  addressed  not  only  to  the  poet  in  particular 
but  to  human  beings  in  general.  The  passage  may  have 
had  some  influence  on  Keats  when  he  framed  the  scheme 
of  Endymion:  what  is  certain  is  that  we  shall  find  its 
thoughts  and  even  its  words  recurring  forcibly  to  his 
mind  in  an  hour  of  despondency  some  thirty  months 
later:  let  us  therefore  postpone  its  consideration 
until  then.  For  the  rest,  it  is  not  difficult  to  show 
correspondence  between  some  of  the  descriptive  passages 
of  Alastor  and  Endymion,  especially  those  telling  of  the 
natural  and  architectural  marvels  amid  which  the 
heroes  wander.  Endymion's  wanderings  we  are  fresh 
from  tracing.    Alastor  before  him  had  wandered — 

where  the  secret  caves 
Rugged  and  dark,  winding  amid  the  springs 
Of  fire  and  poison,  inaccessible 
To  avarice  or  pride,  their  starry  domes 
Of  diamond  and  of  gold  expand  above 
Numerous  and  immeasurable  halls, 
Frequent  with  crystal  columns,  and  clear  shrines 
Of  pearl,  and  thrones  radiant  with  chrysolite. 

But  these  are  the  kind  of  visions  which  may  rise  spon- 
taneously in  common  in  the  minds  of  almost  any  pair 
of  youthful  dreamers.  Shelley's  poetic  style  is  of  course 
as  much  sounder  and  less  experimental  than  that  of 
Keats  at  this  time  as  his  range  and  certainty  of  pene- 
trating and  vivifying  imagination  are,  to  my  apprehension 
at  least,  less :  he  had  a  trained  and  scholarly  feeling  both 
for  the  resources  of  the  language  and  for  its  purity, 
and  Keats  might  have  learnt  much  from  him  as  to 
what  he  should  avoid-.  But  as  we  have  seen,  Keats 
was  firmly  on  his  guard  against  letting  any  outside 
influence  affect  his  own  development,  and  would  not 
visit  Shelley  at  Marlow  during  the  composition  of 
Endymion,  in  order  Hhat  he  might  have  his  own  un- 


HYMN  TO  INTELLECTUAL  BEAUTY     237 

fettered  scope'  and  that  the  spirit  of  poetry  might  work 
out  its  own  salvation  in  him. 

As  to  the  Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty,  written  though 
it  was  by  Shelley  under  the  fresh  impression  of  the 
glory  of  the  Alps  and  also  in  the  first  flush  of  his  acquain- 
tance with  and  enthusiasm  for  Plato,  I  think  Keats  would 
have  felt  its  strain  of  aspiration  and  invocation  too 
painful,  too  near  despair,  to  make  much  appeal  to  him, 
and  that  Shelley's 

Spirit  of  Beauty,  that  dost  consecrate 

With  thine  own  hues  all  thou  dost  shine  upon, 

would  have  seemed  to  him  something  abstract,  remote, 
and  uncomforting.  His  own  imagination  insisted  on 
the  existence  of  something  in  the  ultimate  nature  of  the 
imiverse  to  account  for  what  he  calls  the  ^wild  and 
harmonised  time'  which  he  found  his  spirit  striking 
from  all  the  scattered  and  broken  beauties  of  the  world. 
Vague  and  floating  his  conception  of  that  something 
might  be,  but  it  was  extraordinarily  intense,  partaking 
of  the  concentrated  essence  of  a  thousand  thrilling  joys 
of  perception  and  imagination.  He  had  read  no  Plato, 
though  he  was  of  course  familiar  enough  with  Spenser's 
mellffluous  dilution  of  Platonic  and  neo-Platonic 
doctrine  in  his  four  Hymns.  In  Endymion,  as  in  the 
speculative  passages  of  the  letters  we  have  quoted, 
his  mind  has  to  go  adventuring  for  itself  among  those 
ancient,  for  him  almost  uncharted,  mysteries  of  Love 
and  Beauty.  He  does  not  as  yet  conceive  himself 
capable  of  anj^hing  more  than  steppings,  to  repeat 
his  own  sober  phrase,  of  the  imagination  towards 
truth.  He  does  not  light,  he  does  not  expect  to  light, 
upon  revelations  of  truth  abstract  or  formal,  and 
seems  to  waver  between  the  Adam's  dream  idea  of 
finding  in  some  transcendental  world  all  the  several 
modes  of  earthly  happiness  'repeated  in  a  finer  tone' 
but  yet  retaining  their  severalness,  and  an  idea,  nearer 
to  the  Platonic,  of  a  single  principle  of  absolute  or 
abstract  Beauty,  the  object  of  a  purged  and  perfected 
spiritual   contemplation,   from   which   all   the  varieties 


238  SHELLEY  ON  ENDYMION 

of  beauty  experienced  on  earth  derive  their  quality 
and  oneness.  But  in  his  search  he  strikes  now  and  again, 
for  the  attentive  reader,  notes  of  far  reaching  symbohc 
significance  that  carry  the  mind  to  the  verge  of  the 
great  mysteries  of  things:  he  takes  us  with  him  on 
exploratory  sweeps  and  fetches  of  figurative  thought  in 
regions  almost  beyond  the  reach  of  words,  where  we 
gain  with  him  glimmering  adumbrations  of  the  super- 
sensual  through  distilled  and  spiritualised  remembrance 
of  the  joys  of  sense-perception  at  their  most  intense. 
So  much  for  Keats's  possible  debt  to  Shelley  in  regard 
to  Endymion.  There  is  an  interesting  small  debt  to  be 
recorded  on  the  other  side,  which  critics,  I  think,  have 
hitherto  failed  to  notice.  Shelley,  notwithstanding  his 
interest  in  Keats,  did  not  read  Endymion  till  a  year  or 
more  after  its  publication.  He  had  in  the  meantime 
gone  to  live  in  Italy,  and  having  had  the  volume  sent 
out  to  him  at  Leghorn,  writes:  'much  praise  is  due 
to  me  for  having  read  it,  the  author^s  intention  appearing 
to  be  that  no  person  should  possibly  get  to  the  end  of 
it.  Yet  it  is  full  of  the  highest  and  finest  gleams  of 
poetry:  indeed,  everything  seems  to  be  viewed  by  the 
mind  of  a  poet  which  is  described  in  it.  I  think  if  he 
had  printed  about  fifty  pages  of  fragments  from  it,  I 
should  have  been  led  to  admire  Keats  as  a  poet  more 
than  I  ought,  of  which  there  is  now  no  danger.'  Nothing 
can  be  more  just;  and  in  the  same  spirit  eight  months 
later,  in  May  1820,  he  writes,  'Keats,  I  hope,  is  going 
to  show  himself  a  great  poet;  like  the  sun,  to  burst 
through  the  clouds,  which,  though  dyed  in  the  finest 
colours  of  the  air,  obscured  his  rising.'  About  the  same 
time,  having  heard  of  Keats's  hsemorrhage  and  suffer- 
ings and  of  their  supposed  cause  in  the  hostility  of  the 
Tory  critics,  Shelley  drafted,  but  did  not  send,  his 
famous  indignant  letter  to  the  editor  of  the  Quarterly 
Review.  In  this  draft  he  shows  himself  a  careful  student 
of  Endymion  by  pointing  out  particular  passages  for 
approval.  One  of  these  passages  is  that  near  the  begin- 
ning of  the  third  book  describing  the  wreckage  seen  by 


KEATS  AND  CLARENCE'S  DREAM       239 

the  hero  as  he  traversed  the  ocean  floor  before  meeting 
Glaucus.  Everybody  knows,  in  Shakespeare's  Richard 
III,  Clarence's  dream  of  being  drowned  and  of  what  he 
saw  below  the  sea: — 

What  dreadful  noise  of  waters  in  mine  ears ! 
What  ugly  sights  of  death  within  mine  eyes  ! 
Methought  I  saw  a  thousand  fearful  wrecks; 
Ten  thousand  men  that  fishes  gnawed  upon; 
Wedges  of  gold,  great  anchors,  heaps  of  pearl. 
Inestimable  stones,  unvalued  jewels. 
All  scatter'd  in  the  bottom  of  the  sea. 

Keats,  no  doubt  remembering,  and  in  a  sense  challenging, 

this  passage,  wrote, — 

Far  had  he  roam*d. 
With  nothing  save  the  hollow  vast,  that  foam*d. 
Above,  around,  and  at  his  feet;  save  things 
More  dead  than  Morpheus'  imaginings: 
Old  rusted  anchors,  helmets,  breast-plates  large 
Of  gone  sea-warriors;  brazen  beaks  and  targe; 
Rudders  that  for  a  hundred  years  had  lost 
The  sway  of  human  hand;  gold  vase  emboss'd 
With  long-forgotten  story,  and  wherein 
No  reveller  had  ever  dipp'd  a  chin 
But  those  of  Saturn's  vintage;  mouldering  scrolls. 
Writ  in  the  tongue  of  heaven,  by  those  souls 
Who  first  were  on  the  earth;  and  sculptures  rude 
In  ponderous  stone,  developing  the  mood 
Of  ancient  Nox; — then  skeletons  of  man. 
Of  beast,  behemoth,  and  leviathan, 
And  elephant,  and  eagle,  and  huge  jaw 
Of  nameless  monster. 

Jeffrey  in  his  review  of  the  Lamia  volume  has  a  fine 
phrase  about  this  passage.    It  'comes  of  no  ignoble 
lineage,'  he  says,  'nor  shames  its  high  descent.'    How\^ 
careful  Shelley's  study  of  the  passage  had  been,  and 
how  completely  he  had  assimilated  it,  is  proved  by  his,/ 
doubtless  quite  unconscious,   reproduction  and  ampH-( 
fication  of  it  in  the  fourth  act  of  Proifmtheus  Unhouvd,^ 
which  he  added  as  an  afterthought  to  the  rest  of  the  J 
poem  in  December  1819.    The  wreckage  described  is 
not  that  of  the  sea,  but  that  which  the  light  flashing 


240  SHELLEY  A  BORROWER 

from  the  forehead  of  the  infant  Earth-spirit  reveals  at 
the  earth's  centre. 

The  beams  flash  on 
And  make  appear  the  melancholy  ruins 
Of  cancelled  cycles;  anchors,  beaks  of  ships;       ] 
Planks  turned  to  marble;  quivers,  helms,  and  spears. 
And  gorgon-headed  targes,  and  the  wheels 
Of  scythed  chariots,  and  the  emblazonry 
Of  trophies,  standards,  and  armorial  beasts. 
Round  which  death  laughed,  sepulchred  emblems 
Of  dead  destruction,  ruin  within  ruin ! 
The  wrecks  beside  of  many  a  city  vast. 
Whose  population  which  the  earth  grew  over 
Was  mortal,  but  not  human;  see,  they  lie. 
Their  monstrous  works,  and  uncouth  skeletons, 
Their  statues,  homes  and  fanes;  prodigious  shapes 
Huddled  in  gray  annihilation,  split. 
Jammed  in  the  hard,  black  deep;  and  over  these. 
The  anatomies  of  unknown  winged  things. 
And  fishes  which  were  isles  of  living  scale. 
And  serpents,  bony  chains,  twisted  around 
The  iron  crags,  or  within  heaps  of  dust 
To  which  the  tortuous  strength  of  their  last  pangs 
Had  crushed  the  iron  crags;  and  over  these 
The  jagged  alligator,  and  the  might 
Of  earth-convulsing  behemoth,  which  once 
Were  monarch  beasts. 


The  derivation  of  this  imagery  from  the  passage  of 
Keats  seems  evident  alike  from  its  general  conception 
and  sequence  and  from  details  like  the  anchors,  beaks, 
targes,  the  prodigious  primeval  sculptures,  the  skeletons 
of  behemoth  and  alligator  and  antediluvian  monsters 
without  name.  Another  possible  debt  of  Shelley  to 
Endymion  has  also  been  suggested  in  the  list  of  delights 
which  the  poet,  in  the  closing  passage  of  Epipsychidioriy 
proposes  to  share  with  his  spirit's  mate  in  their  imagined 
island  home  in  the  iEgean.  If  Shelley  indeed  owes 
anything  to  Endymion  here,  he  has  etherealised  and 
transcendentalised  his  original  even  more  than  Keats 
did  Ovid.  Possibly,  it  may  also  be  suggested,  it  may 
have  been  Shelley's  reading  of  Endymion  that  led  him 


SHELLEY  AND  THE  RIMED  COUPLET    241 

at  this  time  to  take  two  of  the  myths  handled  in  it  by 
Keats  as  subjects  for  his  own  two  lyrics,  Arethusa  and 
the  Hymn  to  Pan  (both  of  1820);  but  he  may  just  as 
well  have  thought  of  these  subjects  independently; 
and  in  any  case  they  are  absolutely  in  his  own  vein, 
nor  was  their  exquisite  leaping  and  Hquid  lightness  of 
rhjrthm  a  thing  at  any  time  within  Keats's  compass. 
It  would  be  tempting  to  attribute  to  a  desire  of  emulating 
and  improving  on  Keats  Shelley's  beautifully  accom- 
plished use  of  the  rimed  couplet  with  varied  pause  and 
free  overflow  in  the  Epistle  to  Maria  Gishome  (1819) 
and  Epipsychidion  (1820),  but  that  he  had  already 
made  a  first  experiment  in  the  same  kind  with  Julian 
and  Maddalo,  written  before  his  copy  of  Endymion  had 
reached  him,  so  that  we  must  take  his  impulse  in  the 
matter  to  have  been  drawn  not  intermediately  through 
Keats  but  direct  from  Leigh  Hunt. 


J    ■ 
CHAPTER  VIII 

DECEMBER  1817-JUNE  1818:  HAMPSTEAD  AND  TEIGNMOUTH: 
EMIGRATION  OF  GEORGE  KEATS 

Hampstead  again:  stage  criticism — Hazlitt's  lectures— Life  at  Well  Walk 
— Meeting  with  Wordsworth — The  'immortal  dinner' — Lamb  forgets 
himself — More  of  Wordsworth — A  happy  evening — Wordsworth  on 
Bacchus — Disillusion  and  impatience — Winter  letters — Maxims  and 
reflections — Quarrels  among  friends — Haydon,  Hunt  and  Shelley — 
A  prolific  February — ^Rants  and  sonnets — A  haunting  memory — 
Six  weeks  at  Teignmouth — Soft  weather  and  soft  men — Isabella  or  the 
Pot  of  Basil — Rich  correspondence — ^Epistle  to  Reynolds — Thirst  for 
knowledge — Need  of  experience — The  two  chambers  of  thought — 
Summer  plans — Preface  to  Endymion — A  family  break-up — To  Scotland 
with  Brown. 

From  finishing  Endymion  at  Burford  Bridge  Keats 
returned  some  time  before  mid-December  to  his  Hamp- 
stead lodging.  The  exact  date  is  micertain;  but  it 
was  in  time  to  see  Kean  play  Richard  III  at  Drury 
Lane  on  the  15th — ^the  actor's  first  performance  after 
a  break  of  some  weeks  due  to  illness.  J.  H.  Reynolds 
had  gone  to  Exeter  for  a  Christmas  hoHday,  and  Keats, 
acting  as  his  substitute,  wrote  four  dramatic  criticisms 
for  the  Champion:  the  first,  printed  on  December  21, 
on  Kean  in  general  and  his  re-appearance  as  Richard  III 
in  particular;  a  second  on  a  hash  of  the  three  parts  of 
Shakespeare's  Henry  VI  produced  under  the  title 
Richard  Duke  of  York,  with  Kean  in  the  name-part 
and  probably  Kean  also  as  compiler;  a  third  on  a 
tragedy  of  small  account  by  one  Dillon,  called  Retri- 
bution, or  the  Chieftain^s  Daughter,  in  which  the  young 
Macready  played  the  part  of  the  villain;  and  a  fourth  on 
a  pantomime  of  Don  Giovanni,    No  one,  least  of  all  one 

242 


HAMPSTEAD  AGAIN:    STAGE  CRITICISM    243 

living  in  Keats's  circle,  could  well  attempt  stage  criticism 
at  this  time  without  trying  to  write  like  Hazlitt.  Keats 
acquits  himself  on  the  whole  rather  youthfully  and 
crudely.  In  one  point  he  is  cruder  than  one  would 
have  expected,  and  that  is  where,  after  re-reading  the 
three  parts  of  Henry  VI  for  his  purpose,  he  retracts 
what  he  had  begun  to  say  about  them  and  declares 
that  they  are  ^perfect  works,'  apparently  without 
any  suspicion  that  Shakespeare's  part  in  them  is  at 
most  that  of  a  beginner  of  genius  touching  up  the  hack- 
work of  others  with  a  fine  passage  here  and  there. 

It  is  only  in  the  notice  of  Kean  as  Richard  III  that 
the  genius  in  Keats  realty  kindles.  Here  his  imagination 
teaches  him  phrases  beyond  the  reach  of  Hazlitt,  to 
express  (there  is  nothing  more  difiicult)  the  specific 
quahty  and  very  thrill  of  the  actor's  voice  and 
utterance.  The  whole  passage  is  of  special  interest, 
both  what  is  groping  in  it  and  what  is  masterly,  and 
alike  for  itself  and  for  such  points  as  its  familiar 
use  of  tags  from  the  then  recent  Christahel  and  Siege  of 
Corinth  : — 


A  melodious  passage  in  poetry  is  full  of  pleasures  both  sensual 
and  spiritual.  The  spiritual  is  felt  when  the  very  letters  and 
points  of  charactered  language  show  like  the  hieroglyphics  of 
beauty;  the  mysterious  signs  of  our  immortal  free-masonry! 
*A  thing  to  dream  of,  not  to  tell' I  The  sensual  life  of  verse 
springs  warm  from  the  lips  of  Kean  and  to  one  learned  in  Shake- 
spearian hieroglyphics — learned  in  the  spiritual  portion  of  those 
lines  to  which  Kean  adds  a  sensual  grandeur;  his  tongue  must 
seem  to  have  robbed  the  Hybla  bees  and  left  them  honeyless! 
There  is  an  indescribable  gusto  in  his  voice,  by  which  we  feel 
that  the  utterer  is  thinking  of  the  past  and  future  while  speaking 
of  the  instant.  When  he  says  in  Othello,  *Put  up  your  bright 
swords,  for  the  dew  will  rust  them,'  we  feel  that  his  throat  had 
commanded  where  swords  were  as  thick  as  reeds.  From  eternal 
risk,  he  speaks  as  though  his  body  were  unassailable.  Again,  his 
exclamation  of  'blood,  blood,  blood!'  is  direful  and  slaughterous 
to  the  deepest  degree;  the  very  words  appear  stained  and 
gory.  His  nature  hangs  over  them,  making  a  prophetic  repast. 
The  voice  is  loosed  on  them,  like  the  wild  dog  on  the  savage 
relics   of   an   eastern   conflict;     and   we   can   distinctly   hear  it 


244  HAZLITT'S  LECTURES 

*  gorging  and  growling  o'er  carcase  and  limb.'  In  Richard,  *  Be- 
stirring with  the  lark  to-morrow,  gentle  Norfolk!'  comes  from 
him  as  through  the  morning  atmosphere  towards  which  he 
yearns.  .  .  .  Surely  this  intense  power  of  anatomizing  the  passions 
of  every  syllable,  of  taking  to  himself  the  airings  of  verse,  is  the 
means  by  which  he  becomes  a  storm  with  such  fiery  decision; 
and  by  which,  with  a  still  deeper  charm,  he  does  his  spiriting 
gently.  Other  actors  are  continually  thinking  of  their  sum- 
total  effect  throughout  a  play.  Kean  delivers  himself  up  to  the 
instant  feeling,  without  a  shadow  of  a  thought  about  anything 
else.  He  feels  his  being  as  deeply  as  Wordsworth,  or  any  other 
of  our  intellectual  monopolists.  From  all  his  comrades  he 
stands  alone,  reminding  us  of  him,  whom  Dante  has  so  finely 
described  in  his  Hell: 

and  sole  apart  retir'd  the  Soldan  fierce.^ 

Although  so  many  times  he  has  lost  the  battle  of  Bosworth 
Field,  we  can  easily  conceive  him  really  expectant  of  victory,  and 
a  different  termination  of  the  piece. 

Keats  was  by  this  time  left  alone  in  Well  Walk, 
having  seen  his  brothers  off  for  Teignmouth,  whither 
George  carried  the  invalid  Tom  for  change  of  climate. 
His  regular  occupation  for  the  next  two  months  was 
revising  and  copying  out  Endymion  for  press.  Regular 
also  was  his  attendance  at  Hazlitt's  evening  lectures 
on  the  English  Poets  at  the  Surrey  Institution.  Of  the 
lectures  on  Shakespeare  which  Coleridge  was  in  the  same 
weeks  delivering  in  Fetter  Lane  Keats  makes  no  mention, 
and  it  is  clear  that  he  made  no  effort  to  go  and  hear 
them,  though  the  distance  of  the  lecture-hall  from  his 
Hampstead  lodging  was  so  much  less.  The  reader  who 
would  fain  conjure  up  for  himself  the  contrasted  per- 
sonalities and  styles  in  public  discourse  of  these  two 
master  critics,  the  shy  and  saturnine,  yet  vigorously 
straight-hitting  and  trenchantly  effective  Hazlitt,  and 
the  ramblingly  mellifluous,  sometimes  beautifully  inspired 
and  sometimes  painfully  drug-beclouded  Coleridge,  can 
draw  but  a  faint  and  tantalized  satisfaction  from  the 
diaries  of  Henry  Crabb  Robinson,  that  assiduous  friend 
and  satellite  of  men  of  genius,  who  punctually  records 

*  Gary's  Dante,  Infemo,  iv,  126. 


LIFE  AT  WELL  WALK  245 

his  attendance  at  both  courses,  but  lacked  the  touch 
that  should  have  made  his  record  live. 

Keats's  letters  to  his  brothers  in  these  winter  months, 
with  a  few  more  to  Bailey  and  Reynolds,  give  us  lively 
glimpses  of  his  social  doings,  and  others,  interesting 
in  the  extreme,  of  the  inward  growth  and  workings  of 
his  mind.  He  tells  of  a  certain  amount  of  common- 
place conviviality:  an  absurd  dance  and  rackety 
supper  at  one  Redhall's;  noisy  Saturday  'concerts' 
at  his  own  rooms,  which  means  that  two  or  three  inti- 
mates came  to  early  afternoon  dinner  and  spent  the 
rest  of  the  day  drinking  claret  and  keeping  up  a  concerted 
racket,  each  in  imitation  of  some  musical  instrument 
(Keats  himself  of  the  bassoon);  but  of  this  pastime 
he  soon  got  tired  and  rather  ashamed.  His  social 
relations  began  to  extend  themselves  more  than  he 
much  cared  about,  or  thought  consistent  with  proper 
industry.  We  find  him  dining  with  Shelley's  friend, 
the  genial  and  admirable  stockbroker  and  man  of 
letters  Horace  Smith,  in  company  with  some  fashionable 
wits,  concerning  whom  he  reflects: — 'They  only  served 
to  convince  me  how  superior  humour  is  to  wit,  in  respect 
to  enjoyment.  These  men  say  things  which  make  one 
start,  without  making  one  feel;  they  are  all  alike; 
they  all  know  fashionables;  they  have  all  a  mannerism 
in  their  eating  and  drinking,  in  their  mere  handling  a 
decanter.  They  talked  of  Kean  and  his  low  company. 
"Would  I  were  with  that  company  instead  of  yours," 
said  I  to  myself.'  Sunday  evenings  were  for  a  while 
set  apart  for  dining  with  Haydon,  and  here,  on  the 
last  Sunday  of  the  year,  Keats  met  Wordsworth  for  the 
first  time. 

Wordsworth  was  on  one  of  his  rare  visits  to  London, 
and  had  been  staying  since  the  beginning  of  December 
with  his  brother  Christopher  at  Lambeth  rectory. 
According  to  Crabb  Robinson,  he  seems  to  have  been 
in  these  weeks  in  one  of  his  stiff  est  and  most  domineering 
moods  of  egotism,  much  ruffled  by  the  moderate  strictures 
of  Coleridge  in  Biographia  Literaria  on  certain  quahties 


246         MEETING  WITH  WORDSWORTH 

in  his  work  and  not  at  all  appeased  by  the  splendid 
praise  which  so  much  out-balanced  them.  One  evening 
in  conversation  he  went  so  far  as  to  treat  that  great 
helpless  genius,  his  old  bosom-friend  and  inspirer,  with 
a  rudeness  of  contradiction  which  even  the  devoted 
Robinson  found  it  hard  to  forgive.^  Near  about  the 
same  time,  hearing  that  the  next  Waverley  novel  was 
to  be  about  Rob  Roy,  he  took  down  his  ballad  so  named, 
read  it  aloud,  and  said  'I  do  not  know  what  more  Mr 
Scott  can  have  to  say  on  the  subject.'  ^  Keats  promptly 
had  full  experience  of  Wordsworth's  egotism,  but  also 
saw  more  genial  aspects  of  his  character.  Quite  coolly 
and  briefly  he  mentions  those  circumstances  of  their 
first  meeting  which  Haydon,  in  a  famous  passage  of  his 
autobiography,  thrusts  before  us  in  the  insistent  colour 
and  illumination  of  a  magic-lantern  picture.  ^I  think,' 
writes  Keats,  'Ritchie  is  going  to  Fezan  in  Africa; 
thence  to  proceed  if  possible  like  Mimgo  Park.  Then 
there  was  Wordsworth,  Lamb,  Monkhouse,  Landseer, 
and  your'humble  servant.  Lamb  got  tipsy  and  blew  up 
Kingston — ^proceeding  so  far  as  to  take  the  candle  across 
the  room,  hold  it  to  his  face,  and  show  us  what  a  soft 
fellow  he  was.'  It  should  be  explained  that  Ritchie  was 
a  young  explorer  whom  Tom  had  met  the  simimer  before 
on  his  run  to  Paris,  and  Kingston  a  thick-witted,  thick- 
skinned,  intrusive  but  kindly  gentleman  of  lion-hunting 
procHvities,  who  as  Comptroller  of  Stamps  had  had 
some  correspondence  with  Wordsworth  and  on  the 
strength  of  this  invited  himself  to  join  Haydon's  party 
in  the  poet's  honour.    Now  for  Haydon: — 

On  December  28th  the  immortal  dinner  came  off  in  my  painting- 
room,  with  Jerusalem  towering  up  behind  us  as  a  background. 
Wordsworth  was  in  fine  cue,  and  we  had  a  glorious  set-to, — on 
Homer,  Shakespeare,  MiUon  and  Virgil.  Lamb  got  exceedingly 
merry  and  exquisitely  witty;  and  his  fun  in  the  midst  of  Words- 
worth's solemn  intonations  of  oratory  was  like  the  sarcasm  and 
wit  of  the  fool  in  the  intervals  of  Lear's  passion.     He  made  a 

1  Diary  of  Henry  Crdbb  Robinson,  as  quoted  by  W.  Knight,  Life  of 
Wordsworth,  ii.  228-9. 
« C.  C.  Clarke,  Recollections  of  Writers,  pp.  149-50. 


THE  'IMMORTAL  DINNER'  247 

speech  and  voted  me  absent,  and  made  them  drink  my  health. 
*Now/  said  Lamb,  *you  old  lake  poet,  you  rascally  poet,  why 
do  you  call  Voltaire  dull?*  We  all  defended  Wordsworth,  and 
affirmed  there  was  a  state  of  mind  when  Voltaire  would  be  dull. 
*  Well, '  said  Lamb,  *  here's  to  Voltaire — the  Messiah  of  the  French 
nation,  and  a  very  proper  one  too.' 

He  then,  in  a  strain  of  humour  beyond  description,  abused 
me  for  putting  Newton's  head  into  my  picture, — 'a  fellow,' 
said  he,  *who  believed  nothing  unless  it  was  as  clear  as  the  three 
sides  of  a  triangle.*  And  then  he  and  Keats  agreed  he  had 
destroyed  all  the  poetry  of  the  rainbow  by  reducing  it  to  the 
prismatic  colours.  It  was  impossible  to  resist  him,  and  we  all 
drank  'Newton's  health,  and  confusion  to  mathematics.*  It 
was  delightful  to  see  the  good-humour  of  Wordsworth  in  giving 
in  to  all  our  frolics  without  affectation  and  laughing  as  heartily 
as  the  best  of  us. 

By  this  time  other  friends  joined,  amongst  them  poor  Ritchie 
who  was  going  to  penetrate  by  Fezzan  to  Timbuctoo.  I  introduced 
him  to  all  as  *a  gentleman  going  to  Africa.*  Lamb  seemed  to 
take  no  notice;  but  all  of  a  sudden  he  roared  out,  'Which  is 
the  gentleman  we  are  going  to  lose?*  We  then  drank  the 
victim's  health,  in  which  Ritchie  joined. 

In  the  morning  of  this  delightful  day,  a  gentleman,  a  perfect 
stranger,  had  called  on  me.  He  said  he  knew  my  friends,  had  an 
enthusiasm  for  Wordsworth  and  begged  I  would  procure  him 
the  happiness  of  an  introduction.  He  told  me  he  was  a  comp- 
troller of  stamps,  and  often  had  correspondence  with  the  poet.  I 
thought  it  a  liberty;  but  still,  as  he  seemed  a  gentleman,  I  told 
him  he  might  come. 

When  we  retired  to  tea  we  found  the  comptroller.  In  intro- 
ducing him  to  Wordsworth  I  forgot  to  say  who  he  was.  After 
a  little  time  the  comptroller  looked  down,  looked  up  and  said  to 
Wordsworth,  'Don't  you  think,  sir,  Milton  was  a  great  genius?* 
Keats  looked  at  me,  Wordsworth  looked  at  the  comptroller. 
Lamb  who  was  dozing  by  the  fire  turned  round  and  said,  'Pray, 
sir,  did  you  say  Milton  was  a  great  genius?*  'No,  sir;  I  asked 
Mr  Wordsworth  if  he  were  not.*  *0h,*  said  Lamb,  'then  you 
are  a  silly  fellow.*  'Charles!  my  dear  Charles!'  said  Words- 
worth; but  Lamb,  perfectly  innocent  of  the  confusion  he  had 
created,  was  off  again  by  the  fire. 

After  an  awful  pause  the  comptroller  said,  'Don*t  you  think 
Newton  a  great  genius?*  I  could  not  stand  it  any  longer; 
Keats  put  his  head  into  my  books.  Ritchie  squeezed  in  a  laugh. 
Wordsworth  seemed  asking  himself,  'Who  is  this?*  Lamb 
got  up,  and  taking  a  candle,  said,  'Sir,  will  you  allow  me  to 


248  LAMB  FORGETS  HIMSELF 

look  at  your  phrenological  development?'  He  then  turned  his 
back  on  the  poor  man,  and  at  every  question  of  the  comptroller 
he  chaunted — 

Diddle  diddle  dumpling,  my  son  John 

Went  to  bed  with  his  breeches  on. 

The  man  in  office,  finding  Wordsworth  did  not  know  who  he  was, 
said  in  a  spasmodic  and  half-chuckling  anticipation  of  assured 
victory,  *I  have  had  the  honour  of  some  correspondence  with 
you,  Mr  Wordsworth/  *With  me,  sir?'  said  Wordsworth, 
*not  that  I  remember/  *  Don't  you,  sir?  I  am  a  comptroller 
of  stamps.'  There  was  a  dead  silence; — the  comptroller  evidently 
thinking  that  was  enough.  While  we  were  waiting  for  Words- 
worth's reply,  Lamb  sung  out 

Hey  diddle  diddle. 
The  cat  and  the  fiddle. 

*My  dear  Charles!'  said  Wordsworth, — 

Diddle  diddle  dumpling,  my  son  John, 

chaunted  Lamb,  and  then  rising,  exclaimed,  *Do  let  me  have 
another  look  at  that  gentleman's  organs.'  Keats  and  I  hurried 
Lamb  into  the  painting-room,  shut  the  door  and  gave  way  to 
inextinguishable  laughter.  Monkhouse  followed  and  tried  to 
get  Lamb  away.  We  went  back  but  the  comptroller  was  irrec- 
oncilable. We  soothed  and  smiled  and  asked  him  to  supper. 
He  stayed  though  his  dignity  was  sorely  affected.  However, 
being  a  good-natured  man,  we  parted  all  in  good  humour,  and 
no  ill  effects  followed. 

All  the  while,  until  Monkhouse  succeeded,  we  could  hear  Lamb 
struggling  in  the  painting-room  and  calling  at  intervals,  *Who 
is  that  fellow  ?    Allow  me  to  see  his  organs  once  more.' 

It  was  indeed  an  immortal  evening.  Wordsworth's  fine 
intonation  as  he  quoted  Milton  and  Virgil,  Keats's  eager  inspired 
look.  Lamb's  quaint  sparkle  of  lambent  humour,  so  speeded 
the  stream  of  conversation,  that  in  my  life  I  never  passed  a  more 
delightful  time.  All  our  fun  was  within  bounds.  Not  a  word 
passed  that  an  apostle  might  not  have  listened  to.  It  was  a 
night  worthy  of  the  Elizabethan  age,  and  my  solemn  Jerusalem 
flashing  up  by  the  flame  of  the  fire,  with  Christ  hanging  over 
us  like  a  vision,  all  made  up  a  picture  which  will  long  glow 
upon — 

that  inward  eye 
Which  is  the  bliss  of  solitude. 

Keats  made  Ritchie  promise  he  would  carry  his  Endymion  to  the 
great  desert  of  Sahara  and  fling  it  in  the  midst. 


MORE  OF  WORDSWORTH  249 

To  complete  our  impression  of  Wordsworth  at  this 
time  of  his  winter  visit  to  London  in  his  forty-eighth 
year,  let  us  turn  for  a  moment  to  Leigh  Hunt's  recollec- 
tions of  his  looks  and  ways  about  the  same  time. 

Certainly  I  never  beheld  eyes  that  looked  so  inspired  or  super- 
natural. They  were  like  fires  half  burning,  half  smouldering, 
with  a  sort  of  acrid  fixture  of  regard,  and  seated  at  the  end  of 
two  caverns.  One  might  imagine  Ezekiel  or  Isaiah  to  have  had 
such  eyes.  .  .  .  He  had  a  dignified  manner,  with  a  deep  roughish 
but  not  unpleasing  voice,  and  an  exalted  mode  of  speaking.  He 
had  a  habit  of  keeping  his  left  hand  in  the  bosom  of  his  waistcoat; 
and  in  this  attitude,  except  when  he  turned  round  to  take  one  of 
the  subjects  of  his  criticism  from  the  shelves,  he  was  dealing 
forth  his  eloquent  but  hardly  catholic  judgments. 

Hazlitt,  in  words  written  a  few  years  later,  gives  a 
nearly  similar  portrait: — 

He  is  above  the  middle  size,  with  marked  features,  and  an  air 
somewhat  stately  and  Quixotic.  He  reminds  one  of  some  of 
Holbein's  heads,  grave,  saturnine,  with  a  slight  indication  of 
sly  humour.  .  .  .  He  has  a  peculiar  sweetness  in  his  smile,  and 
great  depth  and  manliness  and  a  rugged  harmony  in  the  tones 
of  his  voice.  His  manner  of  reading  his  own  poetry  is  particularly 
imposing,  and  in  his  favourite  passages  his  eye  beams  with 
preternatural  lustre,  and  the  meaning  labours  slowly  up  from 
his  swelling  breast. 

Although  the  great  man  could  praise  or  care  for  no 
contemporary  poetry  save  his  own,  and  had  none  of 
the  sympathetic  or  encouraging  criticism  to  bestow  on 
Keats  which  to  that  ardent  yoimg  spirit  would  have 
meant  so  much,  he  nevertheless  showed  him  no  little 
personal  kindness,  receiving  him  when  he  called  and 
inviting  him  several  times  to  dine  or  sup.  On  his  first 
visit  Keats  was  kept  waiting  till  the  poet  bustled  in, 
full  dressed  in  stiff  stock  and  knee  breeches,  in  haste 
to  keep  a  dinner  appointment  with  one  of  his  official 
chiefs.  This  experience  proved  no  check  to  their 
acquaintance:  neither  did  Wordsworth's  chilling  com- 
ment when  Keats  was  induced  to  read  to  him  the 
hymn  to  Pan  from  Endymion.  ^A  very  pretty  piece 
of  Paganism,'  he  remarked  and  that  was  all.    Severn 


250  A  HAPPY  EVENING 

was  present  at  the  gathering  m  Haydon's  studio  where 
this  reading  took  place.  The  evening's  talk,  he  relates, 
ran  much  on  the  virtues  of  a  vegetable  diet,  which  was 
for  the  moment,  through  the  vehement  advocacy  of 
Shelley,  so  much  in  vogue  in  Leigh  Hunt's  circle  that 
even  the  ruddy  and  robust  Haydon  gave  himself  out 
for  a  proselj^e  like  the  rest,  until  friends  one  day  caught 
him  coming  privily  smacking  his  lips  out  of  a  chop- 
house.  Wordsworth  was  in  a  jocular  mood,  and  asked 
his  herbivorous  friends  whether  they  did  not  welcome 
such  a  succulent  morsel  of  animal  food  as  a  chance 
caterpillar  in  their  cabbage.  Was  it  on  the  same 
occasion  that  the  sage  and  seer  condescended  to  a  pun, 
telling  Haydon  that  if  he  ever  took  the  name  of  another 
artist,  as  some  of  the  old  masters  used  to  do,  it  should 
be  Teniers,  seeing  that  he  had  been  ten  years  working  on 
his  great  picture,  still  unfinished,  of  Christ's  Entry  into 
Jerusalem,  in  which  Wordsworth  and  other  leading 
personages  of  the  time  were  to  figure  among  the  crowd 
of  lookers  on  ? 

A  fortnight  after  their  first  meeting  Keats  re-afiirms 
to  his  brother  the  view  he  had  formerly  expressed  to 
Haydon  that  'If  there  were  three  things  superior  in 
the  modem  world  they  were  The  Excursion,  Haydon's 
Pictures,  and  HazHtt's  depth  of  Taste.'  About  the 
same  time,  that  is  in  the  course  of  January,  he  writes 
of  having  'seen  Wordsworth  frequently':  and  again 
'I  have  seen  a  good  deal  of  Wordsworth.'  A  later 
allusion  implies  that  he  has  seen  him  'with  his  beautiful 
wife  and  his  enchanting  sister.'  At  one  meeting  Keats 
must  have  heard  talk  or  reading  that  delighted  him, 
for  Severn  tells  how  while  he  was  toiling  late  one  night 
over  his  miniature  painting,  Keats  burst  into  his  lodging 
fresh  from  Wordsworth's  company  and  in  a  state  of 
eager  elation  over  his  experience.  It  is  hard  to  refrain 
from  conjecture  as  to  what  had  happened.  What  one 
would  like  to  think  is  that  Wordsworth  had  been  reading 
Keats  some  of  those  great  passages  in  the  Prelude  with- 
out which  the  master  cannot  truly  be  more  than  half 


WORDSWORTH  ON  BACCHUS  251 

known  and  which  remained  unpublished  untU  the  year 
of  his  death.  Or  may  we  possibly  trace  a  clue  to  the 
evening's  enjoyment  in  this  further  note  of  Hazlitt's  on  a 
phase  of  Wordsworth's  conversation? — 

It  is  fine  to  hear  him  talk  of  the  way  in  which  certain  subjects 
should  have  been  treated  by  eminent  poets,  according  to  his 
notions  of  the  art.  Thus  he  finds  fault  with  Dryden's  description 
of  Bacchus  in  the  Alexander's  Feast,  as  if  he  were  a  mere  good- 
looking  youth,  or  boon  companion 

Flushed  with  a  purple  grace. 
He  shows  his  honest  face — 

Instead  of  representing  the  god  returning  from  the  conquest  of 
India,  crowned  with  vine-leaves,  and  dra^Ti  by  panthers,  and 
followed  by  troops  of  sat^Ts,  of  wild  men  and  animals  that  he 
had  tamed.  You  would  think,  in  hearing  him  speak  on  this 
subject,  that  you  saw  Titian's  picture  of  the  meeting  of  Bacchus 
and  Ariadne — so  classic  were  his  conceptions,  so  glowing  his  style.^ 

It  is  tempting  to  seek  some  kind  of  connexion  between 
Keats  in  his  great  Bacchic  ode  in  Endymion  and  Words- 
worth in  this  vein  of  talk.  Had  we  not  known  that 
Endymion  was  finished  before  the  elder  and  the  yoimger 
poet  met,  we  might  have  been  inclined  to  attribute  to 
Wordsworth's  eloquence  some  part  of  Keats's  inspiration. 
And  even  as  it  is  such  possibility  remains  open,  for  it 
must  be  remembered  that  Keats  carefully  re-copied  the 
several  cantos  of  his  poem  during  the  spring,  the  fom-th 
canto  not  until  March,  at  Teignmouth,  and  it  is  conceiv- 
able, though  imlikely,  that  the  triimiph  of  Bacchus 
might  have  been  an  addition  made  in  re-copying. 

It  was  most  likely  a  result  of  the  interest  taken  by 
W^ordsworth  in  Keats  that  the  young  poet  received  at 
this  time  a  friendly  call,  of  which  he  makes  passing 
mention,  from  Crabb  Robinson. 

But  the  more  Keats  saw  of  Wordsworth  himself,  the 
more  critically,  as  his  letters  show,  he  came  gradually 
to  look  upon  him.  He  disliked  the  idea  of  a  man  so 
revered  dining  with  the  foolish  Kingston,  and  refused  to 
dine  and  meet  him  there.    He  regrets,  after  Wordsworth 

iHazlitt,  The  Spirit  of  the  Age:   Collected  Works,  iv,  276. 


252        DISILLUSION  AND  IMPATIENCE 

has  gone,  that  he  has  'left  a  bad  impression  wherever 
he  has  visited  in  town  by  his  egotism,  Vanity,  and 
bigotry;^  adding,  'yet  he  is  a  great  poet  if  not  a 
philosopher.'  The  fullest  expression  of  this  critical 
attitude  occurs  in  a  letter  written  to  Reynolds  at  the 
beginning  of  February.  Keats  is  for  the  moment  out 
of  conceit  with  the  poets  of  his  own  time;  particularly 
with  Wordsworth,  whom  he  had  always  devoutly 
reverenced  from  a  distance,  and  with  Hunt,  next  to 
Cowden  Clarke  his  earliest  encourager  and  sympathiser, 
whom  to  his  disappointment  he  had  lately  foimd  more 
ready  to  carp  than  praise  when  he  read  him  the  early 
books  of  Endymion.  It  seems  Hunt  would  have  liked 
the  talk  of  Endymion  and  Peona  to  come  nearer  his 
own  key  of  simpering  triviality  in  Rimini.  'He  says,' 
writes  Keats,  'the  conversation  is  unnatural  and  too 
high-flown  for  Brother  and  Sister — says  it  should  be 
simple,  forgetting  do  ye  mind  that  they  are  both  over- 
shadowed by  a  supernatural  Power  and  perforce  could 
not  talk  like  Francesca  in  the  Rimini.  He  must  first 
prove  that  Caliban's  poetry  is  unnatural.  This  with 
me  completely  overturns  his  objections.'  In  revising 
Endymion  for  press  Keats  proved  his  wise  adherence 
to  his  own  point  of  view  by  cutting  out  some  of  the 
passages  most  infected  with  the  taint  of  Hunt's  familiar 
tea-party  manner.  The  words  in  which  he  expresses  his 
impatience  of  the  several  dogmatisms  of  Wordsworth 
and  Hunt  are  vital  in  relation  to  his  own  conception 
of  poetry  and  of  its  right  aim  and  working: — 

It  may  be  said  that  we  ought  to  read  our  contemporaries, 
that  Wordsworth  etc.,  should  have  their  due  from  us.  But, 
for  the  sake  of  a  few  fine  imaginative  or  domestic  passages,  are 
we  to  be  buUied  into  a  certain  Philosophy  engendered  in  the  whims 
of  an  Egotist?  Every  man  has  his  speculations,  but  every  man 
does  not  brood  and  peacock  over  them  till  he  makes  a  false 
coinage  and  deceives  himself.  Many  a  man  can  travel  to  the 
very  bourne  of  Heaven,  and  yet  want  confidence  to  put  down 
his  half-seeing.  Sancho  will  invent  a  Journey  heavenward  as 
well  as  anybody.  We  hate  poetry  that  has  a  palpable  design 
upon  us,  and,  if  we  do  not  agree,  seems  to  put  its  hand  into  its 


WINTER  LETTERS  253 

breeches  pocket.  Poetry  should  be  great  and  unobtrusive,  a 
thing  which  enters  into  one's  soul,  and  does  not  startle  or  amaze 
it  with  itself,  but  with  its  subject.  How  beautiful  are  the  retired 
flowers !  how  would  they  lose  their  beauty  were  they  to  throng 
into  the  highway  crying  out,  *  Admire  me,  I  am  a  violet!  Dote 
upon  me,  I  am  a  primrose ! '  Modern  poets  differ  from  the 
Elizabethans  in  this:  each  of  the  moderns  like  an  Elector  of 
Hanover  governs  his  petty  state,  and  knows  how  many  straws 
are  swept  daily  from  the  Causeways  in  all  his  dominions,  and  has 
a  continual  itching  that  all  the  Housewives  should  have  their 
coppers  well  scoured.  The  ancients  were  Emperors  of  vast 
Provinces,  they  had  only  heard  of  the  remote  ones  and  scarcely 
cared  to  visit  them.  I  will  cut  all  this — I  will  have  no  more  of 
Wordsworth  or  Hunt  in  particular.  ...  I  don't  mean  to  deny 
Wordsworth's  grandeur  and  Hunt's  merit,  but  I  mean  to  say 
we  need  not  be  teazed  with  grandeur  and  merit  when  we  can  have 
them  uncontaminated  and  unobtrusive. 

These  winter  letters  of  Keats  are  full  of  similar  first 
fruits  of  young  reflection,  thoughts  forming  or  half- 
forming  themselves  in  absolute  sincerity  as  he  writes, 
intuitions  of  his  first-endeavouring  mind  on  the  search 
for  vital  truths  of  art  and  nature  and  humanity.  Imper- 
fect, half-wrought  phrases  often  come  from  him  which 
prove,  when  you  have  lived  with  them,  to  be  more 
sufficient  as  well  as  more  suggestive  than  if  they  had 
been  chiselled  into  precision  by  longer  study  and  a 
more  confident  mind.  For  instance:  'the  excellence 
of  every  art  is  its  intensity,  capable  of  making  all  dis- 
agreeables evaporate  from  their  being  in  close  relation- 
ship with  Beauty  and  Truths  a  sentence  worth  whole 
treatises  and  fit,  sketchy  as  it  is,  to  serve  as  text  to  all 
that  can  justly  be  discoursed  concerning  problems  of  art 
in  its  relation  to  nature, — of  realism,  romance,  and  the 
rest.     Or  this : — 

Brown  and  Dilke  walked  with  me  and  back  to  the  Christmas 
pantomime.  I  had  not  a  dispute,  but  a  disquisition,  with  Dilke 
upon  various  subjects;  several  things  dove-tailed  in  my  mind, 
and  at  once  it  struck  me  what  quality  went  to  form  a  man  of 
achievement,  especially  in  literature,  and  which  Shakespeare 
possessed  so  enormously — I  mean  Negative  Capability,  that  is, 
when   a  man   is   capable   of  being   in   uncertainties,   mysteries. 


254  MAXIMS  AND  REFLECTIONS 

doubts,  without  any  irritable  reaching  after  fact  and  reason. 
Coleridge,  for  instance,  would  let  go  by  a  fine  isolated  verisimili- 
tude caught  from  the  Penetralium  of  mystery,  from  being 
incapable  of  remaining  content  with  half-knowledge.  This 
pursued  through  volumes  would  perhaps  take  us  no  further 
than  this,  that  with  a  great  poet  the  sense  of  Beauty  over- 
comes every  other  consideration,  or  rather  obliterates  all  consid- 
eration. 

Or  this:— 

In  poetry  I  have  a  few  axioms,  and  you  will  see  how  far  I  am 
from  their  centre. 

1st.  I  think  poetry  should  surprise  by  a  fine  excess,  and  not 
by  singularity;  it  should  strike  the  reader  as  a  wording  of  his 
own  highest  thoughts,  and  appear  almost  a  remembrance. 

2nd.  Its  touches  of  beauty  should  never  be  half-way,  thereby 
making  the  reader  breathless,  instead  of  content.  The  rise,  the 
progress,  the  setting  of  Imagery  should,  like  the  sun,  come 
natural  to  him,  shine  over  him,  and  set  soberly,  although  in 
magnificence,  leaving  him  in  the  luxury  of  twilight. 

But  it  is  easier  to  think  what  poetry  should  be,  than  to  write 
it.  And  this  leads  me  to  another  axiom — That  if  poetry  comes 
not  as  naturally  as  the  leaves  to  a  tree,  it  had  better  not  come 
at  all.  However  it  may  be  with  me,  I  cannot  help  looking  into 
new  countries  with  *0  for  a  muse  of  Fire  to  ascend!' 
If  Endymion  serves  me  as  a  pioneer,  perhaps  I  ought  to  be 
content — I  have  great  reason  to  be  content,  for  thank  God  I 
can  read,  and  perhaps  understand  Shakespeare  to  his  depths; 
and  I  have  I  am  sure  many  friends,  who,  if  I  fail  will  attribute 
any  change  in  my  life  and  temper  to  humbleness  rather  than 
pride — to  a  cowering  under  the  wings  of  great  poets,  rather  than 
to  a  bitterness  that  I  am  not  appreciated. 

Cogitations  of  this  cast,  not  less  fresh  than  deep,  and 
often  throwing  a  clear  retrospective  light  on  the  moods 
and  aims  which  governed  him  in  writing  Endymion, 
are  interspersed  at  the  beginning  of  the  year  with  regrets 
at  dissensions  rife  among  his  friends.  The  strain  between 
Haydon  and  Hmit  had  increased  since  the  autimm,  and 
now,  over  a  sordid  matter  of  money  borrowed  by  Mrs 
Hunt — ^by  all  accounts  the  most  unabashed  of  petty 
spongers — and  not  repaid,  grew  into  an  active  quarrel. 
Another  still  fiercer  quarrel  broke  out  between  Haydon 


QUARRELS  AMONG  FRIENDS  255 

and  Reynolds,  who  with  all  his  fine  qualities  seems  to 
have  been  quick  and  touchy,  and  whom  we  find  later 
in  open  breach  with  his  admirable  brother-in-law 
Thomas  Hood.  Keats  was  not  involved.  With  his 
distinguished  good  sense  and  good  heart  in  matters  of 
friendship,  he  knew  how  to  keep  in  close  and  affectionate 
touch  with  what  was  loveable  or  likeable  in  each  of  the 
disputants  severally.  His  comments  are  the  best  key 
to  the  best  part  of  himself,  and  show  him  as  the  true 
great  spirit,  by  character  not  less  than  by  gift,  among 
the  group. 

Things  have  happened  lately  of  great  perplexity — ^you  must 
have  heard  of  them — Reynolds  and  Haydon  retorting  and  re- 
criminating, and  parting  for  ever — the  same  thing  has  happened 
between  Haydon  and  Hunt.  It  is  unfortunate — Men  should 
bear  with  each  other:  there  lives  not  the  Man  who  may  not  be 
cut  up,  aye  lashed  to  pieces  on  his  weakest  side.  The  best  of 
men  have  but  a  portion  of  good  in  them — a  kind  of  spiritual 
yeast  in  their  frames,  which  creates  the  ferment  of  existence — 
by  which  a  Man  is  propelled  to  act,  and  strive,  and  buffet  with 
Circumstance.  The  sure  way,  Bailey,  is  first  to  know  a  Man's 
and  then  be  passive — if  after  that  he  insensibly  draws  you 
towards  him  then  you  have  no  power  to  break  the  link.  Before 
I  felt  interested  in  either  Reynolds  or  Haydon,  I  was  well  read 
in  their  faults;  yet,  knowing  them,  I  have  been  cementing 
gradually  with  both.  I  have  an  affection  for  them  both,  for 
reasons  almost  opposite — and  to  both  must  I  of  necessity  cling, 
supported  always  by  the  hope  that,  when  a  little  time,  a  few 
years,  shall  have  tried  me  more  fully  in  their  esteem,  I  may  be 
able  to  bring  them  together.  The  time  must  come,  because  they 
have  both  hearts  and  they  will  recollect  the  best  parts  of  each 
other,  when  this  gust  is  overblown. 

Of  Haydon  himself  and  of  his  powers  as  a  painter 
Keats  continued  to  think  as  highly  as  ever,  seeing  in 
his  pictures,  as  the  friends  and  companions  of  every 
ardent  and  persuasive  worker  in  the  arts  are  apt  to 
see,  not  so  much  the  actual  performance  as  the  idea 
he  had  pre-conceived  of  it  in  the  light  of  his 
friend's  enthusiastic  ambition  and  eloquence.  Severn  re- 
peatedly insists  on  Keats's  remarkably  keen  natural 
instinct   for   and   understanding   of   the   arts   both   of 


256        HAYDON,  HUNT,  AND  SHELLEY 

music  and  painting.  Cowden  Clarke's  piano-playing 
had  been  one  of  the  chief  pleasures  of  his  school-days: 
as  to  the  capacity  he  felt  in  himself  for  judging  the 
works  of  painting,  here  is  his  own  scrupulously  modest 
and  sincere  estimate  expressed  to  Haydon  a  little 
later: 

Believe  me  Haydon  your  picture  is  part  of  myself — I  have 
ever  been  too  sensible  of  the  labyrinthian  path  to  eminence 
in  Art  (judging  from  Poetry)  ever  to  think  I  understood  the 
emphasis  of  painting.  The  innumerable  compositions  and 
decompositions  which  take  place  between  the  intellect  and  its 
thousand  materials  before  it  arrives  at  that  trembling  delicate 
and  snail-horn  perception  of  beauty.  I  know  not  your  many 
havens  of  intenseness — nor  ever  can  know  them:  but  for  this 
I  hope  nought  you  achieve  is  lost  upon  me:  for  when  a  School- 
boy the  abstract  idea  I  had  of  an  heroic  painting — was  what  I 
cannot  describe.  I  saw  it  somewhat  sideways,  large,  prominent, 
round,  and  colour'd  with  magnificence — somewhat  like  the  feel 
I  have  of  Anthony  and  Cleopatra.  Or  of  Alcibiades  leaning  on 
his  Crimson  Couch  in  his  Galley,  his  broad  shoulders  imperceptibly 
heaving  with  the  Sea. 

With  Hunt  also,  in  spite  of  the  momentary  causes 
of  annoyance  we  have  seen,  Keats's  intercourse  continued 
frequent,  while  with  Reynolds  his  intimacy  grew  daily 
closer.  At  Himt's  he  again  saw  something  of  Shelley. 
'The  Wednesday  before  last  Shelley,  Hunt,  and  I, 
wrote  each  a  sonnet  on  the  river  Nile,^  he  tells  his 
brothers  on  the  16th  of  February,  1818.  The  sonnets 
are  preserved.  They  were  to  be  written,  it  was  agreed, 
in  a  quarter  of  an  hour.  Shelley  and  Keats  were  up  to 
time,  but  Himt  had  to  sit  up  half  the  night  to  finish 
his.  It  was  worth  the  pains,  and  with  it  for  once  the 
small  poet  outdid  the  two  great.  'I  have  been  writing,' 
continues  Keats,  'at  intervals,  many  songs  and  sonnets, 
and  I  long  to  be  at  Teignmouth  to  read  them  over  to 
you.'  With  the  help  of  his  manuscripts  or  of  the  tran- 
scripts made  from  them  by  his  friends,  it  is  possible  to 
retrace  the  actual  order  of  many  of  these  fugitive 
pieces.  On  the  16th  of  January  was  written  the  sonnet 
on  Mrs  Reynolds's  cat,  perhaps  Keats's  best  thing  in 


A  PROLIFIC  FEBRUARY  257 

the  humorous  vein;  on  the  21st,  after  seeing  in  Leigh 
Hunt's  possession  a  lock  of  hair  reputed  to  be  Milton's, 
the  address  to  that  poet  beginning  ^  Chief  of  organic 
numbers !'  which  he  sends  to  the  prime  Milton  enthusiast 
among  his  friends,  Benjamin  Bailey,  with  the  comment, 
'This  I  did  at  Himt's,  at  his  request, — ^perhaps  I  should 
have  done  something  better  alone  and  at  home.'  The 
first  two  lines, — 

Chief  of  organic  numbers. 
Old  scholar  of  the  spheres  I 

read  like  an  anticipation  in  the  rough  of  the  first  stanza  of 
Tennyson's  masterly  set  of  alcaics  already  referred  to, 
beginning  '0  mighty-mouthed  inventor  of  harmonies/ 
To  the  22nd  belongs  the  sonnet,  *0  golden  tongued 
Romance  with  serene  lute,'  in  which  Keats  bids  himself 
lay  aside  (apparently)  his  Spenser,^  in  order  to  read 
again  the  more  rousing  and  human-passionate  pages 
of  Lear,  This  is  one  of  the  last  of  his  sonnets  written 
in  the  Petrarchan  form  as  followed  by  Milton  and 
Wordsworth,  and  from  henceforth  he  follows  the 
Shakespearean  form  almost  exclusively.  On  the  31st 
he  writes  to  Reynolds  in  a  rolHcking  mood,  and  sends 
him  the  lines  to  Apollo  beginning  'Hence  Burgundy, 
Claret,  and  Port,'  part  rant  (the  word  is  his  own)  pure 
and  simple,  part  rant  touched  with  genius,  and  giving 
words  to  a  very  frequent  and  intense  phase  of  feeling 
in  himseK: — 

Aye,  when  the  soul  is  fled 
Too  high  above  our  head, 
Affrighted  do  we  gaze 
After  its  airy  maze, 
As  doth  a  mother  wild. 
When  her  young  infant  child 
Is  in  an  eagle's  claws — 
And  is  not  this  the  cause 
Of  madness  ? — God  of  Song, 
Thou  bearest  me  along 

*  Woodhouse  suggests  that  the  romance  which  he  lays  aside  is  his  own 
Bndymion,  meaning  his  task  of  seeing  it  through  the  press:  but  this  must 
surely  be  a  mistake. 


258  RANTS  AND  SONNETS 

Through  sights  I  scarce  can  bear: 

O  let  me,  let  me  share 

With  the  hot  lyre  and  thee. 

The  staid  Philosophy. 

Temper  my  lonely  hours. 

And  let  me  see  thy  bowers  ; 

More  unalarm'd !  ^ 

By  way  of  a  sober  conclusion  to  the  same  letter,  he  adds 
the  very  fine  and  profoundly  felt  sonnet  in  the  Shake- 
spearean form  beginning  ^When  I  have  fears  that  I 
may  cease  to  be/  which  he  calls  his  last.  On  the  3rd 
of  February  he  sends  two  spirited  sets  of  verses  in  the 
favourite  four-beat  measure,  heptasyllable  varied  with 
octosyllable,  of  the  later  Elizabethans  and  the  youthful 
Milton,  namely  those  to  Robin  Hood  (suggested  by  a 
set  of  sonnets  by  Reynolds  on  Sherwood  Forest)  and 
those  on  the  Mermaid  Tavern.  On  the  4th  comes 
another  Shakespearean  sonnet,  that  beginning  'Timers 
sea  has  been  five  years  at  its  slow  ebb,'  in  which  he 
recalls  the  memory  of  an  old,  persistent,  haimting 
love-fancy.  The  two  sonnets  of  January  31  and 
February  4  should  be  read  strictly  together: — 

When  I  have  fears  that  I  may  cease  to  be 

Before  my  pen  has  glean'd  my  teeming  brain. 
Before  high-piled  books,  in  charact'ry. 

Hold  like  full  garners  the  fuU-ripen'd  grain; 
When  I  behold,  upon  the  night's  starr'd  face, 

Huge  cloudy  symbols  of  a  high  romance. 
And  think  that  I  may  never  live  to  trace 

Their  shadows,  with  the  magic  hand  of  chance; 
And  when  I  feel,  fair  creature  of  an  hour ! 

That  I  shall  never  look  upon  thee  more. 
Never  have  relish  in  the  faery  power 

Of  unreflecting  love ! — then  on  the  shore 
Of  the  wide  world  I  stand  alone,  and  think. 
Till  Love  and  Fame  to  nothingness  do  sink. 

Time's  sea  hath  been  five  years  at  its  slow  ebb; 

Long  hom-s  have  to  and  fro  let  creep  the  sand; 
Since  I  was  tangled  in  thy  beauty's  web. 

And  snared  by  the  ungloving  of  thine  hand. 


A  HAUNTING  MEMORY  259 

And  yet  I  never  look  on  midnight  sky, 

But  I  behold  thine  eyes*  well  memoried  light; 
I  cannot  look  upon  the  rose's  dye. 

But  to  thy  cheek  my  soul  doth  take  its  flight; 
I  cannot  look  on  any  budding  flower. 

But  my  fond  ear,  in  fancy  at  thy  lips. 
And  hearkening  for  a  love-sound,  doth  devour 

Its  sweets  in  the  wrong  sense: — Thou  dost  eclipse 
Every  delight  with  sweet  remembering, 
And  grief  unto  my  darling  joys  dost  bring. 

The  former  is  far  the  richer  in  contents,  and  in  the  light 
of  the  tragedy  to  come  its  two  first  quatrains  now  seem 
to  thrill  with  prophetic  meaning.  But  what  is  singul^x 
is  that  in  the  third  quatrain  should  be  recalled,  in  the 
same  high  strain  of  emotion,  the  vision  of  a  beauty 
seen  but  not  even  accosted  three-and-a-half  years 
earlier  (not  really  five)  in  the  public  gardens  at  Vauxhall, 
and  then  (August,  1814)  addressed  in  what  are  almost 
the  earliest  of  Keats's  dated  verses,  those  in  which  he 
calls  for  a  ^brimming  bowl,' — 

From  my  despairing  heart  to  charm 

The  Image  of  the  fairest  form 

That  e'er  my  reveling  eyes  beheld. 

That  e'er  my  wandering  fancy  spell'd.  .  .  .* 

Such,  Woodhouse  assures  us,  is  the  case,  and  the  same 
memory  fills  the  second  sonnet:  but  this  it  might  be 
possible  to  take  rather  as  a  fine  Shakespearean  exercise 
than  as  an  expression  of  profound  feeling.  On  the  5th, 
Keats  sends  another  sonnet  postponing  compliance 
for  the  present  with  an  invitation  of  Leigh  Hunt's  to 
compose  something  in  honour,  or  in  emulation,  of 
Spenser;  and  on  the  8th,  the  sonnet  in  praise  of  the 
colour  blue  composed  by  way  of  protest  against  one  of 
Reynolds  preferring  black,  at  least  in  the  coloimng  of 
feminine  eyes.  About  the  same  time  he  agreed  with 
Re3aiolds  that  they  should  each  write  some  metrical 

1  Woodhouse  Transcripts  (Poetry  II)  in  Crewe  MS.  These  verses  are 
only  to  be  found  in  the  latest  editions  of  Keats.  They  are  not  good,  but 
interesting  as  containing  in  embryo  ideas  which  afterwards  grew  into 

great  poetry  in  the  nightingale  ode,  the  first  book  of  Endymion,  and  the 
de  to  Melancholy. 


260  SIX  WEEKS  AT  TEIGNMOUTH 

tales  from  Boccaccio,  and  publish  them  in  a  joint 
volume;  and  began  at  once  for  his  own  part  with  the 
first  few  stanzas  of  Isabella;  or,  the  Pot  of  Basil.  A  little 
later  in  this  so  prolific  month  of  February  we  find  him 
rejoicing  in  the  song  of  the  thrush  and  blackbird,  and 
melted  into  feelings  of  indolent  pleasure  and  receptivity 
imder  the  influence  of  spring  winds  and  dissolving  rain. 
He  theorizes  pleasantly  in  a  letter  to  Reynolds  on  the 
virtues  and  benefits  of  this  state  of  mind,  trans- 
lating the  thrush's  music  into  some  blank-verse  lines  of 
subtle  and  haunting  cadence,  in  which,  disowning  for 
the  nonce  his  habitual  doctrine  of  the  poet's  paramount 
need  of  knowledge,  he  makes  the  thrush  say, 

O  fret  not  after  knowledge — I  have  none, 
And  yet  my  song  comes  native  with  the  warmth, 
O  fret  not  after  knowledge — I  have  none, 
And  yet  the  evening  listens. 

In  the  course  of  the  next  fortnight  we  find  him  in 
correspondence  with  Taylor  about  the  corrections  to 
Endymion;  and  soon  afterwards  making  a  clearance  of 
borrowed  books,  and  otherwise  preparing  to  flit.  His 
brother  George,  who  had  been  taking  care  of  Tom 
at  Teignmouth  since  December,  was  now  obliged 
to  come  to  town,  bent  on  a  scheme  of  marriage 
and  emigration;  and  Tom's  health  having  made  a 
momentary  rally,  Keats  was  unwilling  that  he  should 
leave  Teignmouth,  and  determined  to  join  him  there. 
He  started  in  the  second  week  of  March,  and  stayed 
almost  two  months.  It  was  an  unlucky  season  for 
weather, — the  soft-buffeting  sheets  and  misty  drifts 
of  Devonshire  rain  renewing  themselves  wave  on  wave, 
in  the  inexhaustible  way  all  lovers  of  that  country 
know,  throughout  almost  the  whole  spring,  and  prevent- 
ing him  from  getting  more  than  occasional  tantalizing 
snatches  of  enjoyment  in  the  beauty  of  the  scenery, 
the  walks,  and  flowers.  His  letters  are  full  of  whimsical 
objurgations  not  only  against  the  climate,  but  against 
the  male  inhabitants,  whose  fibre  he  chooses  to  conceive 
relaxed  by  it: — 


SOFT  WEATHER  AND  SOFT  MEN       261 

You  may  say  what  you  will  of  Devonshire:  the  truth  is,  it  is 
a  splashy,  rainy,  misty,  snowy,  foggy,  haily,  floody,  muddy, 
slipshod  county.  The  hills  are  very  beautiful,  when  you  get  a 
sight  of  'em — the  primroses  are  out,  but  then  you  are  in — the 
Cliffs  are  of  a  fine  deep  colour,  but  then  the  Clouds  are  continually 
vieing  with  them — the  women  like  your  London  people  in  a  sort 
of  negative  way — because  the  native  men  are  the  poorest 
creatures  in  England — because  Government  never  have  thought 
it  worth  while  to  send  a  recruiting  party  among  them.  When 
I  think  of  Wordsworth's  Sonnet,  'Vanguard  of  Liberty!  ye 
men  of  Kent ! '  the  degenerated  race  about  me  are  Pulvis  ipecac, 
simplex — a  strong  dose.  Were  I  a  corsair,  I'd  make  a  descent 
on  the  south  coast  of  Devon;  if  I  did  not  run  the  chance  of  having 
Cowardice  imputed  to  me.  As  for  the  men,  they'd  run  away 
into  the  Methodist  meeting-houses,  and  the  women  would  be 
glad  of  it.  .  .  .  Such  a  quelling  Power  have  these  thoughts  over 
me  that  I  fancy  the  very  air  of  a  deteriorating  quality.  I  fancy 
the  flowers,  all  precocious,  have  an  Acrasian  spell  about  them — 
I  feel  able  to  beat  off  the  Devonshire  waves  like  soap-froth.  I 
think  it  well  for  the  honour  of  Britain  that  Julius  Caesar  did 
not  first  land  in  this  County.  A  Devonshirer  standing  on  his 
native  hills  is  not  a  distinct  object — he  does  not  show  against 
the  light — a  wolf  or  two  would  dispossess  him. 


A  man  of  west-country  descent  should  have  known 
better.  Why  did  not  the  ghost  of  William  Browne  of 
Tavistock  arise  and  check  Keats's  hand,  and  recite  for 
his  rebuke  the  burst  in  praise  of  Devon  from  Britannia^s 
Pastorals,  with  its  happy  echo  of  the  Virgilian  Salve 
magna  parens  and  Haec  genus  acre  virum  f — 

Hail  thou  my  native  soil:  thou  blessed  plot 

Whose  equal  all  the  world  aff ordeth  not ! 

Shew  me  who  can  so  many  christall  rills. 

Such  sweet-clothed  vallies,  or  aspiring  hills, 

Such  wood-ground,  pastures,  quarries,  wealthy  mines. 

Such  rocks  in  whom  the  diamond  fairly  shines: 

And  if  the  earth  can  shew  the  like  again; 

Yet  will  she  fail  in  her  sea-ruling  men. 

Time  never  can  produce  men  to  o'er-take 

The  fames  of  Grenville,  Davies,  Gilbert,  Drake, 

Or  worthy  Hawkins  or  of  thousands  more 

That  by  their  power  made  the  Devonian  shore 

Mock  the  proud  Tagus. 


262     ISABELLA;  OR,   THE  POT  OF  BASIL 

Of  the  Devonshire  girls  Keats  thought  better  than  of 
their  menkind,  and  writes  and  rimes  on  them  with  a 
certain  skittishness  of  admiration.  With  one  local 
family,  a  Mrs  Jeffrey  and  her  daughters,  he  and  his 
brothers  were  on  terms  of  warm  friendship,  as  is  shown 
by  his  correspondence  with  them  a  year  later.  One  of 
the  daughters  married  afterwards  a  Mr  Prowse,  and 
pubHshed  two  volumes  of  very  tolerable  sentimental 
verse:  some  of  their  contents,  as  interpreted  (says  Mr 
Buxton  Forman)  by  Teignmouth  tradition,  would 
indicate  that  her  heart  had  been  very  deeply  touched 
by  the  young  poet  during  his  stay:  but  of  responsive 
feelings  on  his  own  part  his  letters  give  no  hint,  and  it 
was  only  a  few  weeks  later  that  he  wrote  how  his  love 
for  his  brothers  had  hitherto  stifled  any  impression 
that  a  woman  might  have  made  on  him. 

Besides  his  constant  occupation  in  watching  and 
cheering  the  invalid  Tom,  who  had  a  relapse  just  after 
he  came  down,  Keats  was  busy  during  these  Devonshire 
days  seeing  through  the  press  the  last  sheets  of  Endymion. 
He  also  composed,  with  the  exception  of  the  few  verses 
he  had  begun  at  Hampstead,  the  whole  of  Isabella;  or, 
the  Pot  of  Basil,  the  first  of  his  longer  poems  written 
with  real  maturity  of  art  and  certainty  of  touch.  At 
the  same  time,  no  doubt  with  his  great  intended  effort, 
Hyperion,  in  mind,  he  was  studying  and  appreciating 
Milton  as  he  had  never  done  before.  He  had  been 
steeped  since  boyhood  in  the  charm  of  the  minor  poems, 
from  the  Vacation  Exercise  to  Lycidas,  and  had  read 
but  not  greatly  cared  for  Paradise  Lost,  until  first 
Severn,  and  then  more  energetically  Bailey,  had  in- 
sisted that  this  was  a  reproach  to  him:  and  he  now 
threw  himself  upon  that  poem,  and  penetrated  with 
the  grasp  and  swiftness  of  genius,  as  his  marginal 
criticisms  show,  into  the  very  essence  of  its  power  and 
beauty.  His  correspondence  with  his  friends,  particu- 
larly Bailey  and  Reynolds,  is  during  this  same  time 
unusually  sustained  and  full.  Sometimes  his  vein  is 
light  and  titterly  (to  use  a  word  of  his  own)  as  I  have 


RICH  CORRESPONDENCE  263 

indicated,  and  sometimes  he  masks  an  anxious  heart 
beneath  a  lively  manner,  as  thus: — 

But  ah  Coward !  to.  talk  at  this  rate  to  a  sick  man,  or,  I  hope, 
to  one  that  was  sick — for  I  hope  by  this  you  stand  on  your  right 
foot.  If  you  are  not — that's  all, — I  intend  to  cut  all  sick  people 
if  they  do  not  make  up  their  minds  to  cut  Sickness — a  fellow  to 
whom  I  have  a  complete  aversion,  and  who  strange  to  say  is 
harboured  and  countenanced  in  several  houses  where  I  \dsit — 
he  is  sitting  now  quite  impudent  between  me  and  Tom — he  insults 
me  at  poor  Jem  Rice's — and  you  have  seated  him  before  now 
between  us  at  the  Theatre,  when  I  thought  he  looked  with  a 
longing  eye  at  poor  Kean.  I  shall  say,  once  for  all,  to  my  friends, 
generally  and  severally,  cut  that  fellow,  or  I  cut  you. 

On  another  day  he  recurs  to  the  mood  of  half  real  half 
mock  impatience  against  those  who  rub  the  bloom  off 
things  of  beauty  by  over-commenting  and  over-interpret- 
ing them,  a  mood  natural  to  a  spirit  dwelling  so  habitually 
and  intuitively  at  the  heart  of  beauty  as  his: — 

It  has  as  yet  been  a  Mystery  to  me  how  and  where  Wordsworth 
went.  I  can't  help  thinking  he  has  returned  to  his  Shell — with 
his  beautiful  Wife  and  his  enchanting  Sister.  It  is  a  great  Pity 
that  People  should  by  associating  themselves  with  the  finest 
things,  spoil  them.  Hunt  has  damned  Hampstead  and  masks 
and  sonnets  and  Italian  tales.  Wordsworth  has  damned  the 
lakes.  Milman  has  damned  the  old  drama — ^West  has  damned 
wholesale.  Peacock  has  damned  satire — Oilier  has  damn'd 
Music — Hazlitt  has  damned  the  bigoted  and  the  blue-stockinged; 
how  durst  the  Man?  he  is  your  only  good  damner,  and  if  ever 
I  am  damn'd — danm  me  if  I  shouldn't  like  him  to  damn  me. 

Once,  writing  to  Reynolds,  he  resumes  his  habit  of  a 
year  and  a  half  earlier,  and  casts  his  fancies  and  reflec- 
tions into  rime.  Beginning  playfully,  he  tells  of  an 
odd  jumble  of  incongruous  images  that  had  crossed 
his  brain,  a  kind  of  experience  expressed  by  him  else- 
where in  various  strains  of  verse,  e.g.  the  finished 
poem  FaTicy  and  the  careless  lines  beginning  'Welcome 
Joy,  and  welcome  Sorrow.'  He  supposes  that  some 
people  are  not  subject  to  such  freaks  of  the  mind's  eye, 
but  have  it  consistently  haunted  by  fine  things  such  as 
he  next  proceeds  to  conjure  up  from  memory, — 


264  EPISTLE  TO  REYNOLDS 

Some  Titian  colours  touched  into  real  life, — 

The  sacrifice  goes  on;  the  pontiff  knife 

Gleams  in  the  Sun,  the  milk-white  heifer  lows. 

The  pipes  go  shrilly,  the  libation  flows; 

A  white  sail  shows  above  the  green-head  cliff. 

Moves  round  the  point,  and  throws  her  anchor  stiff; 

The  mariners  join  hymn  with  those  on  land. 

There  exists  no  such  picture  of  a  sacrifice  by  Titian, 
and  what  Keats  was  thinking  of,  I  feel  sure,  was  the 
noble  *  Sacrifice  to  Apollo'  by  Claude  from  the  Leigh 
Court  collection,  which  he  had  seen  at  the  British  In- 
stitution in  1816  (hung,  as  it  happened,  next  to  Titian's 
Europa  from  Cobham  Hall),  and  which  evidently  worked 
deeply  on  his  mind.  To  memory  of  it  is  probably  due 
that  magic  vision  of  a  little  town  emptied  of  its  folk  on 
a  morning  of  sacrifice,  which  he  evoked  a  year  later  in 
the  ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn.  It  shows  to  the  right  an 
altar  in  front  of  a  temple  of  Apollo,  and  about  the  altar 
a  group  including  king  and  priest  and  a  young  man 
holding  down  a  victim  ox  by  the  horns;  people  with 
baskets  and  offerings  coming  up  from  behind  the  temple; 
and  to  the  left  tall  trees  with  a  priest  leading  in  another 
victim  by  the  horns,  and  a  woman  with  a  jar  bringing  in 
libation;  a  little  back,  two  herdsmen  with  their  goats; 
a  river  spanned  by  a  bridge  and  winding  towards  a 
sea-bay  partly  encircled  by  mountains  which  close  the 
view,  and  on  the  edge  of  the  bay  the  tower  and  roofs  of 
a  little  town  indistinctly  seen.  Recollection  of  this 
Claude  leads  Keats  on  quickly  to  that  of  another,  the 
famous  'Enchanted  Castle/  which  he  partly  mixes  up 
with  it,  and  partly  transforms  by  fantasy  into  something 
quite  different  from  what  it  really  is.  He  forgets  the 
one  human  figure  in  the  f oregroimd,  describes  figures  and 
features  of  the  landscape  which  are  not  there,  and 
remembering  that  the  architecture  combines  ancient 
Roman  with  mediaeval  castellated  and  later  Palladian 
elements,  invents  for  it  far-fetched  origins  and  associa- 
tions which  in  a  more  careless  fashion  almost  remind 
one  of  those  invented  by  Pope  for  his  Temple  of  Fame. 
(A  year  later,  all  this  effervescence  of  the  imagination 


THIRST  FOR  KNOWLEDGE  265 

about  the  picture  had  subsided,  and  the  distilled  and 
concentrated  essence  of  its  romance  was  expressed — so 
at  least  I  conceive — ^in  the  famous  *  magic  casement^ 
phrase  at  the  end  of  the  Nightingale  ode.^ 

From  this  play  of  fancy  about  two  half-remembered 
pictures  Keats  turns  suddenly  to  reflections,  which  he 
would  like  to  banish  but  cannot,  on  the  ^eternal  fierce 
destruction^  which  is  part  of  nature^s  law: — 

But  I  saw  too  distinct  into  the  core 

Of  an  eternal  fierce  destruction. 

And  so  from  happiness  I  far  was  gone. 

Still  am  I  sick  of  it,  and  tho',  to-day, 

IVe  gathered  young  spring-leaves,  and  flowers  gay 

Of  periwinkle  and  wild  strawberry. 

Still  do  I  that  most  fierce  destruction  see. 

The  Shark  at  savage  prey, — the  Hawk  at  pounce, — 

The  gentle  Robin,  like  a  Pard  or  Ounce, 

Ravening  a  worm. — Away,  ye  horrid  moods ! 

Moods  of  one's  mind ! 

The  letters  of  this  date  should  be  read  and  re-read  by 
all  who  want  to  get  to  the  centre  of  Keats's  mind  or  to 
hold  a  key  to  the  understanding  of  his  deepest  poetry. 
The  richest  of  them  all  is  that  in  which  he  sends  the 
fragments  of  an  ode  to  Maia  written  on  May  day  with 
the  (alas!  unfulfilled)  promise  to  finish  it  'in  good 
time.'  The  same  letter  contains  the  re-assertion  of  a 
purpose  declared  in  a  letter  of  a  week  before  to  Mr 
Taylor  in  the  phrases,  'I  find  I  can  have  no  enjoyment 
in  the  world  but  the  continual  drinking  of  knowledge. 
I  find  there  is  no  worthy  pursuit  but  the  idea  of  doing 
some  good  to  the  world.  .  .  .  There  is  but  one  way  for 
me.  The  road  lies  through  application,  study  and 
thought.  I  will  pursue  it.'  The  mood  of  the  verses 
interpreting  the  song  of  the  thrush  a  few  weeks  earlier 
has  passed,  the  reader  will  note,  clean  out  of  the  poet's 
mind.    To  Reynolds  his  words  are: — 

An  extensive  knowledge  is  needful  to  thinking  people — it  takes 
away  the  heat  and  fever;    and  helps,  by  widening  speculation, 

^The  'Enchanted  Castle,'  which  Keats  explicitly  names,  belonged  at 
this  date  to  Mr  Wells  of  Redleaf ,  and  was  not  exhibited  until  1819,  so  that 
he  probably  knew  it  only  through  the  engraving  by  VivarSs  and  WooUett. 


266  NEED  OF  EXPERIENCE 

to  ease  the  Burden  of  the  Mystery,  a  thing  which  I  begin  to 
understand  a  Httle,  and  which  weighed  upon  you  in  the  most 
gloomy  and  true  sentence  in  your  letter.  The  difference  of  high 
Sensations  with  and  without  knowledge  appears  to  me  this: 
in  the  latter  case  we  are  falling  continually  ten  thousand  fathoms 
deep  and  being  blown  up  again,  without  wings,  and  with  all 
[the]  horror  of  a  bare-shouldered  creature — in  the  former  case, 
our  shoulders  are  fledged,  and  we  go  through  the  same  air  and 
space  without  fear. 

Let  it  never  be  forgotten  that  'sensations*  contrasted 
with  thoughts'  mean  for  Keats  not  pleasures  and 
experiences  of  the  senses  as  opposed  to  those  of  the  mind, 
but  direct  intuitions  of  the  imagination  as  opposed  to 
deHberate  processes  of  the  imderstanding;  and  that 
by  'philosophy'  he  does  not  mean  metaphysics  but 
knowledge  and  the  fruits  of  reading  generally. 

The  same  letter,  again,  contains  an  interesting  medita- 
tion on  the  relative  qualities  of  genius  in  Milton  and 
Wordsworth  as  affected  by  the  relative  stages  of  history 
at  which  they  lived,  and  on  the  further  question  whether 
Wordsworth  was  a  greater  or  less  poet  than  Milton  by 
virtue  of  being  more  taken  up  with  human  passions  and 
problems.  This  speculation  leads  on  to  one  of  Keats's 
finest  passages  of  life-wisdom: — 

And  here  I  have  nothing  but  surmises,  from  an  uncertainty 
whether  Milton's  apparently  less  anxiety  for  Humanity  proceeds 
from  his  seeing  further  or  not  than  Wordsworth:  And  whether 
Wordsworth  has  in  truth  epic  passion,  and  martyrs  himself  to 
the  human  heart,  the  main  region  of  his  song.  In  regard  to  his 
genius  alone — we  find  what  he  says  true  as  far  as  we  have  ex- 
perienced and  we  can  judge  no  further  but  by  larger  experience 
— for  axioms  in  philosophy  are  not  axioms  until  they  are  proved 
upon  our  pulses.  We  read  fine  things,  but  never  feel  them  to 
the  full  until  we  have  gone  the  same  steps  as  the  author. — I 
know  this  is  not  plain;  you  will  know  exactly  my  meaning  when 
I  say  that  now  I  shall  relish  Hamlet  more  than  I  have  ever  done 
— Or,  better — you  are  sensible  no  man  can  set  down  Venery  as 
a  bestial  or  joyless  thing  until  he  is  sick  of  it,  and  therefore  all 
philosophising  on  it  would  be  mere  wording.  Until  we  are  sick, 
we  understand  not;  in  fine,  as  Byron  says,  *  Knowledge  is 
sorrow';  and  I  go  on  to  say  that  *  Sorrow  is  wisdom' — and 
further  for  aught  we  can  know  for  certainty  *  Wisdom  is  folly.* 


J 


THE  TWO  CHAMBERS  OF  THOUGHT     267 

Presently  follows  the  famous  chain  of  images  by  which 
Keats,  searching  and  probing  for  himself  along  path- 
ways of  the  spirit  parallel  to  those  followed  by  Words- 
worth in  the  Lines  composed  a  few  miles  above  Tintem 
Abbey,  renders  accomit  to  himself  of  the  stage  of 
development  to  which  his  mind  has  now  reached: — 

Well — I  compare  human  life  to  a  large  Mansion  of  many 
apartments,  two  of  which  I  can  only  describe,  the  doors  of  the 
re^t  being  as  yet  shut  upon  me.  The  first  we  step  into  we  call 
tne  Infant,  or  Thoughtless  Chamber,  in  which  we  remain  as 
long  as  we  do  not  think.  We  remain  there  a  long  while,  and 
notwithstanding  the  doors  of  the  second  Chamber  remain  wide 
open,  showing  a  bright  appearance,  we  care  not  to  hasten  to  it; 
but  are  at  length  imperceptibly  impelled  by  the  awakening  of 
the  thinking  principle  within  us — ^we  no  sooner  get  into  the 
second  Chamber,  which  I  shall  call  the  Chamber  of  Maiden- 
Thought,  than  we  become  intoxicated  with  the  light  and  the 
atmosphere,  we  see  nothing  but  pleasant  wonders,  and  think 
of  delaying  there  for  ever  in  delight.  However  among  the  effects 
this  breathing  is  father  of  is  that  tremendous  one  of  sharpening 
one's  vision  into  the  heart  and  nature  of  Man — of  convincing 
one's  nerves  that  the  world  is  full  of  Misery  and  Heartbreak, 
Pain,  Sickness,  and  oppression — whereby  this  Chamber  of  Maiden 
Thought  becomes  gradually  darkened,  and  at  the  same  time, 
on  all  sides  of  it,  many  doors  are  set  open — but  all  dark — all 
leading  to  dark  passages.  We  see  not  the  balance  of  good  and 
evil;  we  are  in  a  mist,  we  are  now  in  that  state,  we  feel  the 
*  Burden  of  the  Mystery.'  To  this  point  was  Wordsworth  come, 
as  far  as  I  can  conceive,  when  he  wrote  Tintem  Abbey y  and  it 
seems  to  me  that  his  genius  is  explorative  of  those  dark  Passages. 
Now  if  we  live,  and  go  on  thinking,  we  too  shall  explore  them. 

Here  is  a  typical  case  of  the  method  of  evocation  as 
against  the  method  of  exposition.  Wordsworth's  lines 
are  written  with  a  high,  almost  an  inspired,  power  of 
describing  and  putting  into  direct  words  the  successive  \ 
moods  of  a  spirit  gradually  ripening  and  deepening  in 
the  power  of  coromunion  with  nature,  and  through  nature, 
with  all  life.  But  Keats,  fully  as  he  has  pondered 
them,  cannot  be  satisfied  that  they  fit  his  own  case 
until  he  has  called  up  the  history  of  his  similar  experi- 
ences in  the  form  natural  to  him,  the  form,  that  is,  of 


268  SUMMER  PLANS 

concrete  similitudes  or  visions  of  the  imagination — 
the  Thoughtless  Chamber,  the  Chamber  of  Maiden 
Thought  with  its  gradual  darkening  and  its  many 
outlets  standing  open  to  be  explored.  It  is  significant 
that  such  visions  should  still  be  of  architecture,  of 
halls  and  chambers  in  an  imagined  mysterious  building. 
Apart  from  his  growing  sense  of  the  darker  sides  of 
human  existence  and  of  the  mysteries  of  good  and  evil, 
Keats  was  suffering  at  this  time  from  the  pain  of  a 
family  break-up  now  imminent.  George  Keats  had 
made  up  his  mind  to'  emigrate  to  America,  and  embark 
his  capital,  or  as  much  of  it  as  he  could  get  possession 
of,  in  business  there.  Besides  the  wish  to  push  his  own 
fortunes,  a  main  motive  of  this  resolve  on  George's 
part  was  the  desire  to  be  in  a  position  as  quickly  as 
possible  to  help  or  if  need  be  support,  his  poet-brother. 
He  persuaded  the  girl  to  whom  he  had  long  been  attached, 
Miss  Georgiana  Wylie,  to  share  his  fortunes,  and  it  was 
settled  that  they  were  to  be  married  and  sail  early  in 
the  summer.  Some  of  Keats's  letters  during  the  last 
weeks  of  his  stay  at  Teignmouth  are  taken  up  with  his 
plans  for  the  time  immediately  following  this  change. 
He  wavered  for  a  while  between  two  incompatible 
purposes.  One  was  to  go  for  a  simimer^s  walking  tour 
through  Scotland  with  Charles  Brown.  *I  have  many 
reasons,'  he  writes  to  Reynolds,  'for  going  wonder- 
ways;  to  make  my  winter  chair  free  from  spleen; 
to  enlarge  my  vision;  to  escape  disquisitions  on 
poetry,  and  Kingston-criticism;  to  promote  digestion 
and  economize  shoe-leather.'  (How  'economize,'  one 
wonders?)  'I'll  have  leather  buttons  and  belt,  and  if 
Brown  hold  his  mind,  "over  the  hills  we  go."  If  my 
books  will  keep  me  to  it,  then  will  I  take  all  Europe  in 
turn,  and  see  the  kingdoms  of  the  earth  and  the  glory 
of  them.'  Here  we  find  Keats  in  his  turn  caught  by 
the  romance  of  wild  lands  and  of  travel  which  had  in 
various  ways  been  so  much  of  an  inspiration  to  Byron 
and  Shelley  before  him.  A  fortnight  later  we  find  him 
inclining  to  give  up  this  purpose  under  an  overmastering 


PREFACE  TO  ENDYMION  269 

sense  of  the  inadequacy  of  his  own  attainments,  and  of 
the  necessity  of  acquiring  knowledge,  and  ever  more 
knowledge,  to  sustain  the  flight  of  poetry. 

The  habit  of  close  self-observation  and  self-criticism 
is  in  most  natures  that  possess  it  allied  with  vanity  and 
egoism;  but  it  was  not  so  in  Keats,  who  without  a 
shadow  of  affectation  judges  himself,  both  in  his  strength 
and  weakness,  as  the  most  clear-sighted  and  disin- 
terested friend  might  judge.  He  is  inclined,  when  not  on 
the  defensive  against  what  he  felt  to  be  foolish  criticism, 
to  underrate  rather  than  to  overrate  his  own  work, 
and  in  his  correspondence  of  the  previous  year  we 
have  foxmd  him  perfectly  aware  that  in  writing  Endymion 
he  has  rather  been  working  off  a  youthful  ferment  of 
the  mind  than  producing  a  sound  or  satisfying  work 
of  poetry.  And  when  the  time  comes  to  write  a  preface 
to  the  poem,  he  in  a  first  draft  makes  confession  to  the 
public  of  his  'non-opinion  of  himself  in  terms  both 
a  little  too  intimate  and  too  fidgeting  and  uneasy. 
Re3aiolds  seeing  the  draft  at  once  recognised  that  it 
would  not  do,  and  in  criticizing  it  to  Keats  seems  to 
have  told  him  that  it  was  too  much  in  the  manner  of 
Leigh  Hunt.  In  deference  to  his  judgment  Keats  at 
once  abandoned  it,  and  a  second  attempt  says  briefly, 
with  perfect  dignity  and  taste,  all  that  can  justly  be 
said  in  dispraise  of  his  work.  He  warns  the  reader  to 
expect  'great  inexperience,  immaturity,  and  every 
error  denoting  a  feverish  attempt,  rather  than  a  deed 
accomplished,'  and  adds  most  unboastfully : — 'it  is 
just  that  this  youngster  should  die  away:  a  sad  thought 
for  me,  if  I  had  not  some  hope  that  while  it  is  dwindling 
I  may  be  plotting,  and  fitting  myself  for  verses  fit  to 
live.' 

Keats  and  Tom,  the  latter  for  the  moment  easier  in 
health,  were  back  at  Hampstead  in  the  last  week  of 
May,  in  time  for  the  marriage  of  their  brother  George 
with  Miss  Georgiana  Wylie.  This  was  the  young  lady 
to  whom  Keats  had  rimed  a  valentine  for  his  brother 
two   years    earlier   (the  lines   beginning   'Hadst    thou 


270  A  FAMILY  BREAK-UP 

liv'd  in  days  of  old')  and  to  whom  he  had  also  on  his 
own  account  addressed  the  charming  sonnet,  'Nymph 
of  the  downward  smile  and  sidelong  glance/  With  no 
other  woman  or  girl  friend  was  he  ever  on  such  easy 
and  cordial  terms  of  intimacy.  The  wedding  took 
place  'a  week  ago/  writes  Keats  on  June  4,  and  about 
the  same  date,  in  order  that  he  may  not  miss  seeing  as 
much  of  the  young  couple  as  possible  before  their 
departure,  he  declines  a  warm  invitation  from  Bailey 
to  visit  him  again  at  Oxford.  Writing,  as  usual  to  this 
correspondent,  with  absolute  openness,  Keats  shows  that 
he  is  suffering  from  one  of  his  moods  of  overmastering 
depression.  First  it  takes  the  form  of  apathy.  Bailey 
had  written  eagerly  and  judiciously  in  praise  of  Endymion 
in  the  Oxford  Herald.    Keats  replies  on  June  1 : — 

My  intellect  must  be  in  a  degenerating  state — it  must  be — 
for  when  I  should  be  writing  about — God  knows  what — I  am 
troubling  you  with  moods  of  my  own  mind,  or  rather  body,  for 
mind  there  is  none.  I  am  in  that  temper  that  if  I  were  under 
water  I  would  scarcely  kick  to  come  up  to  the  top — I  know 
very  well  'tis  all  nonsense.  In  a  short  time  I  hope  I  shall  be  in 
a  temper  to  feel  sensibly  your  mention  of  my  book.  In  vain 
have  I  waited  till  Monday  to  have  my  Interest  in  that,  or  any- 
thing else.  I  feel  no  spur  at  my  Brother's  going  to  America, 
and  am  almost  stony-hearted  about  his  wedding.  All  this  will 
blow  over.  All  I  am  sorry  for  is  having  to  write  to  you  in  such 
a  time — but  I  cannot  force  my  letters  in  a  hotbed.  I  could  not 
feel  comfortable  in  making  sentences  for  you. 

Nine  days  later  the  mood  has  deepened  to  one  of  positive 
despondency,  but  it  is  the  despondency  of  a  great  and 
generous  spirit: — 

Were  it  in  my  choice,  I  would  reject  a  Petrarchal  coronation 
— on  account  of  my  dying  day,  and  because  women  have  cancers. 
I  should  not  by  right  speak  in  this  tone  to  you  for  it  is  an  in- 
cendiary spirit  that  would  do  so.  Yet  I  am  not  old  enough  or 
magnanimous  enough  to  annihilate  self — and  it  would  perhaps 
be  paying  you  an  ill  compliment.  I  was  in  hopes  some  little  time 
back  to  be  able  to  relieve  your  dulness  by  my  spirits — to  point 
out  things  in  the  world  worth  your  enjoyment — and  now  I  am 
never  alone  without  rejoicing  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  death 
— without  placing  my  ultimate  in  the  glory  of  dying  for  a  great 


TO  SCOTLAND  WITH  BROWN  271 

human  purpose.  Perhaps  if  my  affairs  were  in  a  different  state, 
I  should  not  have  written  the  above — ^>^ou  shall  judge:  I  have 
two  brothers;  one  is  driven,  by  The  'burden  of  Society,*  to 
America;  the  other,  with  an  exquisite  love  of  life,  is  in  a  lingering 
state.  My  love  for  my  Brothers,  from  the  early  loss  of  our  parents, 
and  even  from  earlier  misfortunes,  has  grown  into  an  affection 
'passing  the  love  of  women.*  I  have  been  ill-tempered  with 
them — I  have  vexed  them — but  the  thought  of  them  has  always 
stifled  the  impression  that  any  woman  might  otherwise  have 
made  upon  me.  I  have  a  sister  too,  and  may  not  follow  them 
either  to  America  or  to  the  grave.  Life  must  be  undergone, 
and  I  certainly  derive  some  consolation  from  the  thought  of 
writing  one  or  two  more  poems  before  it  ceases. 

Meanwhile  his  fluctuations  of  purpose  between  a  plunge 
into  a  life  of  solitude  and  study  and  an  excursion  in 
Brown's  company  to  Scotland  had  been  decided  in 
favour  of  the  Scottish  tour.  George  and  his  bride 
having  to  set  out  for  Liverpool  on  June  22,  it  was 
aiTanged  that  Keats  and  Brown  should  accompany  them 
so  far  on  their  way  to  the  north.  The  coach  started 
from  the  Swan  and  two  Necks  in  Lad  Lane,  and  on  the 
first  day  stopped  for  dinner  at  Redboume  near  St 
Albans,  where  Keats's  friend  of  medical  student  days, 
Mr  Stephens,  was  in  practice.  He  came  to  shake  hands 
with  the  travelling  party  at  the  poet's  request,  and 
many  years  afterwards  wrote  an  account  of  the  inter- 
\dew,  the  chief  point  of  which  is  a  description  of  Mrs 
George  Keats.  'Rather  short,  not  what  might  be 
called  strictly  handsome,  but  looked  like  a  being  whom 
any  man  of  moderate  sensibility  might  easily  love. 
She  had  the  imaginative  poetical  cast.  Somewhat 
singular  and  girlish  in  her  attire.  .  .  .  There  was  some- 
thing original  about  her,  and  John  seemed  to  regard  her 
as  a  being  whom  he  delighted  to  honour,  and  introduced 
her  with  evident  satisfaction.' 


^ 


CHAPTER  IX 

JUNE-AUGUST  1818:    THE  SCOTTISH  TOUR 

First  sight  of  Windermere — Ambleside,  Rydal,  Keswick — Attitude  towards 
scenery — Ascent  of  Skiddaw — A  country  dancing-school — Dumfries — 
The  Galloway  coast — Meg  Merrilies — Flying  visit  to  BeKast — Contrasts 
and  reflections — The  Duchess  of  Dunghill — The  Ayrshire  coast — In 
Bums's  cottage — Lines  on  his  pilgrimage — Through  Glasgow  to  Loch 
Lomond — A  confession — Loch  Awe  to  the  coast — Hardships — ^Kerrera 
and  Mull — Staffa — A  sea  cathedral — Ben  Nevis — Tour  cut  short — 
Return  to  Hampstead. 

The  farewells  at  Liverpool  over,  Keats  and  Brown  went 
on  by  coach  to  Lancaster,  thence  to  begin  their  tour  on 
foot.  Keats  took  for  his  reading  one  book  only,  the 
miniature  three-volume  edition  of  Cary^s  Dante.  Brown, 
it  would  appear,  carried  a  pocket  Milton.  They  found 
the  town  of  Lancaster  in  an  uproar  with  the  preparations 
for  a  contested  election  and  were  glad  to  leave  it.  Rising 
at  four  in  the  morning  (June  25th)  to  make  a  start  before 
breakfast,  they  were  detained  by  a  downpour,  during 
which  Brown  preached  patience  from  Samson  Agonistes; 
at  seven  they  set  out  in  a  still  dripping  mist ;  breakfasted 
at  Bolton-le-Sands;  stopped  to  dine  at  the  village  of 
Burton-in-Kendal,  and  found  the  inns  crowded,  to  their 
hosts'  distraction,  with  soldiers  summoned  by  the 
Lowther  interest  to  keep  order  at  the  election.  This  was 
the  famous  contest  where  Brougham  had  the  effrontery, 
as  his  opponents  considered  it,  to  go  down  and  challenge 
for  the  first  time  the  power  of  that  great  family  in  their 
own  country.  The  same  state  of  things  prevailed 
farther  down  the  road.    Hearing  that  they  could  not 

272 


FIRST  SIGHT  OF  WINDERMERE         273 

hope  to  find  a  bed  at  Kendal,  they  slept  in  a  mean 
roadside  inn  at  End  Moor,  taking  interested  note  of  a 
sad  old  dog  of  a  drunkard,  faUen  from  better  days, 
whom  they  foimd  there;  and  the  next  morning  walked 
on,  passing  Kendal  on  their  way,  as  far  as  Bowness  on 
Windermere.  As  they  dropped  down  the  hill  and  came 
in  sight  of  the  lake  the  weather  yielded  fine  effects  of 
clearance  after  rain;  and  Brown,  in  the  account  com- 
piled twenty  years  later  from  his  diaries  written  at  the 
time,^  expatiates  in  full  romantic  vein  on  the  joy  and 
amazement  with  which  Keats  and  he  drank  in  the 
beauties  of  the  varied  and  shifting  scene  before  them: — 

On  the  next  morning,  after  reaching  Kendal,  we  had  our  first 
really  joyous  walk  of  nine  miles  towards  the  lake  of  Windermere. 
The  country  was  mild  and  romantic,  the  weather  fine,  though 
not  sunny,  while  the  fresh  mountain  air,  and  many  larks  about 
us,  gave  us  unbounded  delight.  As  we  approached  the  lake 
the  scenery  became  more  and  more  grand  and  beautiful,  and 
from  time  to  time  we  stayed  our  steps,  gazing  intently  on  it. 
Hitherto,  Keats  had  witnessed  nothing  superior  to  Devonshire; 
but,  beautiful  as  that  is,  he  was  now  tempted  to  speak  of  it  with 
indifference.  At  the  first  turn  from  the  road,  before  descending 
to  the  hamlet  of  Bowness,  we  both  simultaneously  came  to  a 
full  stop.  The  lake  lay  before  us.  His  bright  eyes  darted  on 
a  mountain-peak,  beneath  which  was  gently  floating  on  a  silver 
cloud;  thence  to  a  very  small  island,  adorned  with  the  foliage 
of  trees,  that  lay  beneath  us,  and  surrounded  by  water  of  a 
glorious  hue,  when  he  exclaimed — 'How  can  I  believe  in  that? 
— surely  it  cannot  be!'  He  warmly  asserted  that  no  view  in 
the  world  could  equal  this — that  it  must  beat  all  Italy — ^yet, 
having  moved  onward  but  a  hundred  yards — catching  the 
further  extremity  of  the  lake,  he  thought  it  *more  and  more 
wonderfully  beautiful ! '  The  trees  far  and  near,  the  grass 
immediately  around  us,  the  fern  and  the  furze  in  their  most 
luxuriant  growth,  all  added  to  the  charm.  Not  a  mist,  but  an 
imperceptible  vapour  bestowed  a  mellow,  softened  tint  over 
the  immense  mountains  on  the  opposite  side  and  at  the  further 
end  of  the  lake. 


*This  account  was  published  in  The  Plymouth  and  Devonport  Weekly 
Journal,  beginning  October  1,  1840,  but  was  unluckily  stopped  after  the 
fourth  number  and  carries  us  no  farther  than  to  Ballantrae  on  the  Ayrshire 
coast.    I  believe  this  is  the  first  time  that  it  has  been  used  or  quoted. 


274  AMBLESIDE,  RYDAL,  KESWICK 

After  a  bathe  and  a  midday  meal  at  Bowness  the 
friends  walked  on  with  ever  increasing  delight  to  Amble- 
side. Spending  the  night  there  they  scrambled  about  the 
neighbouring  waterfalls,  and  endured  as  patiently  as 
they  could  the  advances  of  a  youth  lately  from  Oxford, 
touring  knapsack  on  back  like  themselves  but  painfully 
bent  on  showing  himself  off  for  a  scholar  and  buck  about 
town,  airing  his  pedigree  and  connexions  while  affecting 
to  make  light  of  them.  The  next  day  they  went  on  by 
Grasmere  to  Rydal,  where  they  paused  that  Keats 
might  call  and  pay  his  respects  to  Wordsworth.  But 
the  poet  was  away  at  Lowther  Castle  electioneering  (he 
had  been  exerting  himself  vigorously  in  the  Tory  and 
Lowther  interest  since  the  spring  in  prospect  of  this 
contest).  Complete  want  of  sympathy  with  the  cause 
of  his  absence  made  Keats's  disappointment  the  keener; 
and  finding  none  of  the  family  at  home  he  could  do  no 
more  than  leave  a  note  of  regret.  The  same  afternoon 
the  travellers  reached  the  hamlet  of  Wythburn  and  slept 
there  as  well  as  fleas  would  allow,  intending  to  climb 
Helvellyn  the  next  morning.  Heavy  rain  interfering, 
they  pursued  their  way  by  Thirlmere  to  Keswick,  made 
the  circuit  of  Derwentwater,  visited  the  Druids'  Circle 
and  the  Falls  of  Lodore,  and  set  out  at  four  the  next 
morning  to  climb  Skiddaw.  A  cloud-cap  settling  down 
compelled  them  to  stop  a  little  short  of  the  summit,  and 
they  resumed  their  tramp  by  Bassenthwaite  into  the 
relatively  commonplace  country  lying  between  the  lakes 
and  Carlisle,  making  their  next  night's  resting-place  at 
the  old  market  town  of  Ireby. 

I  have  shown  by  a  specimen  how  Brown,  working 
from  his  diaries  of  the  tour,  expatiates  on  his  and  his 
companion's  enthusiasm  over  the  romantic  scenes  they 
visited.  Keats  in  his  own  letters  says  comparatively 
little  about  the  scenery,  and  that  quite  simply  and 
quietly,  not  at  all  with  the  descriptive  enthusiasm  of 
the  picturesque  tourist:  hardly  indeed  with  so  much 
of  that  quality  as  the  sedate  and  fastidious  Gray  had 
shown  in  his  itineraries  fifty  years  before.    Partly,  no 


ATTITUDE  TOWARDS  SCENERY         275 

doubt,  a  certain  instinctive  reticence,  a  restraining  touch 
of  the  Greek  alB<k,  keeps  him  from  fluent  words  on  the 
beauties  that  most  deeply  moved  him:  his  way  rather 
is  to  let  them  work  silently  in  his  being  until  at  the  right 
moment,  if  the  right  moment  comes,  their  essence  and 
vital  power  shall  distil  themselves  for  him  into  a  phrase 
of  poetry.  Partly,  also,  the  truth  is  that  an  intensely 
active,  intuitive  genius  for  nature  like  his  hardly  needs 
the  stimulus  of  nature's  beauties  for  long  or  at  their 
highest  power,  but  on  a  minimum  of  experience  can 
summon  up  and  multiply  for  itself  spirit  sunsets,  and 
glories  of  dream  lake  and  mountain,  richer  and  more 
varied  than  the  mere  receptive  lover  of  scenery  can 
witness  and  register  in  memory  during  a  Hfetime  of 
travel  and  pursuit.  In  this  respect  Keats's  letters 
written  on  his  northern  tour  seem  more  essentially  the 
letters  of  a  poet  than  Shelley's  from  Switzerland  and 
Italy.  Shelley  pom^  out  long,  set,  detailed  descriptions, 
written  as  any  cultivated  and  enthusiastic  observer 
visiting  such  scenes  for  the  first  time  might  woite,  only 
with  more  beauty  and  resource  of  language,  rather  than 
as  one  made  by  imagination  a  born  partner  and  co- 
creator  with  nature  herself,  free  by  birthright  of  her 
glories  and  knowing  them  aU,  as  it  were,  beforehand. 
Keats's  way  of  telling  about  his  travels  is  quite  familiar 
and  unstrained.  Here  is  a  paragraph  from  his  first 
letter  to  his  brother  Tom,  written  at  Keswick  after 
walking  roimd  Derwentwater  and  climbing  Skiddaw: — 

I  had  an  easy  climb  among  the  streams,  about  the  fragments 
of  Rocks,  and  should  have  got  I  think  to  the  summit,  but  unfor- 
tunately I  was  damped  by  slipping  one  leg  into  a  squashy  hole. 
There  is  no  great  body  of  water,  but  the  accompaniment  is 
delightful;  for  it  oozes  out  from  a  cleft  in  perpendicular  Rocks, 
all  fledged  with  ash  and  other  beautiful  trees.  It  is  a  strange 
thing  how  they  got  there.  At  the  south  end  of  the  Lake  the 
Mountains  of  Borrowdale  are  perhaps  as  fine  as  anything  we 
have  seen.  On  our  return  from  this  circuit,  we  ordered  dinner, 
and  set  forth  about  a  mile  and  a  half  on  the  Penrith  road,  to 
see  the  Druid  temple.  We  had  a  fag  up  hill,  rather  too  near 
dinner-time,   which  was  rendered   void  by  the  gratification   of 


276  ASCENT  OF  SKIDDAW 

seeing  those  aged  stones  on  a  gentle  rise  in  the  midst  of  the 
Mountains,  which  at  that  time  darkened  all  around,  except  at 
the  fresh  opening  of  the  Vale  of  St.  John.  We  went  to  bed 
rather  fatigued,  but  not  so  much  so  as  to  hinder  us  getting  up 
this  morning  to  mount  Skiddaw.  It  promised  all  along  to  be 
fair,  and  we  had  fagged  and  tugged  nearly  to  the  top,  when, 
at  half-past  six,  there  came  a  Mist  upon  us,  and  shut  out  the 
view.  We  did  not,  however,  lose  anything  by  it:  we  were 
high  enough  without  mist  to  see  the  coast  of  Scotland — the  Irish 
Sea — the  hills  beyond  Lancaster — and  nearly  all  the  large  ones 
of  Cumberland  and  Westmoreland,  particularly  Helvellyn  and 
Scawfell.  It  grew  colder  and  colder  as  we  ascended,  and  we 
were  glad,  at  about  three  parts  of  the  way,  to  taste  a  little  rum 
which  the  Guide  brought  with  him,  mixed,  mind  ye,  with 
Mountain  water.  I  took  two  glasses  going  and  one  returning. 
It  is  about  six  miles  from  where  I  am  writing  to  the  top.  So 
we  have  walked  ten  miles  before  breakfast  to-day.  We  went 
up  with  two  others,  very  good  sort  of  fellows.  All  felt,  on 
arising  into  the  cold  air,  that  same  elevation  which  a  cold  bath 
gives  one — I  felt  as  if  I  were  going  to  a  Tournament. 

For  an  instant  only,  the  poet  in  Keats  speaks  vividly  in 
the  tournament  touch;  and  farther  back,  illustrating 
what  I  have  said  about  his  instinct  for  distillation  rather 
than  description,  will  be  found  the  germs  of  two  famous 
passages  in  his  later  verse,  the  ^dark-clustered  trees' 
that 

Fledge  the  wild-ridged  mountains  steep  by  steep 

in  the  Ode  to  Psyche,  and  the  lines  in  Hyperion  about  the 

dismal  cirque 
Of  Druid  stones,  upon  a  forlorn  moor 
When  the  chill  rain  begins  at  shut  of  eve. 
In  dull  November,  and  their  chancel  vault, 
The  Heaven  itself,  is  blinded  throughout  night. 

A  change,  it  should  be  added,  was  coming  over  Keats's 
thoughts  and  feelings  whereby  natural  scenery  in  general 
was  beginning  to  interest  him  less  and  his  feUow  creatures 
more.  In  the  acuteness  of  childish  and  boyish  sensation, 
among  the  suburban  fields  or  on  seaside  holidays,  he  had 
instinctively,  as  if  by  actual  partnership  with  and  self- 
absorption  into  nature,  gained  enough  delighted  know- 
ledge of  her  ways  and  doings  for  his  faculties  to  work  on 


A  COUNTRY  DANCING-SCHOOL  277 

through  a  lifetime  of  poetry;  and  now,  in  his  second 
chamber  of  Maiden-thought,  the  appeal  of  nature,  even 
at  its  most  thrilling,  yields  in  his  mind  to  that  of  humanity. 
'Scenery  is  fine,'  he  had  already  written  from  Devon- 
shire in  the  spring,  'but  human  nature  is  finer.'  So  far 
as  concerns  shrewd  and  interested  observation  of  human 
types  encountered  by  the  way,  he  had  a  sympathetic 
companion  in  Brown,  whose  diary  sets  effectively  before 
us  alike  the  sodden,  wheedling  old  toper,  staggering 
with  hanging  arms  like  a  bear  on  its  hind  feet,  in  the  inn 
at  End  Moor,  and  the  vulgar,  uneasy  gentlemanhood  of 
the  flash  Oxford  man  at  Ambleside.  Here  is  Brown's 
account  of  what  they  saw  at  Ireby: — 

It  is  a  dull,  beggarly  looking  place.  Our  inn  was  remarkably 
clean  and  neat,  and  the  old  host  and  hostess  were  very  civil 
and  prepossessing — but,  heyday!  what  were  those  obstreperous 
doings  overhead?  It  was  a  dancing-school  under  the  tuition  of 
a  travelling  master!  Folks  here  were  as  partial  to  dancing  as 
their  neighbours,  the  Scotch;  and  every  little  farmer  sent  his 
young  ones  to  take  lessons.  We  went  upstairs  to  witness  the 
skill  of  these  rustic  boys  and  girls — fine,  healthy,  clean-dressed, 
and  withal  perfectly  orderly,  as  well  as  serious  in  their  endeavours. 
We  noticed  some  among  them  quite  handsome,  but  the  attention 
of  none  was  drawn  aside  to  notice  us.  The  instant  the  fiddle 
struck  up,  the  slouch  in  the  gait  was  lost,  the  feet  moved,  and 
gracefully,  with  complete  conformity  to  the  notes;  and  they 
wove  the  figure,  sometimes  extremely  complicated  to  my  inex- 
perienced eyes,  without  an  error,  or  the  slightest  pause.  There 
was  no  sauntering,  half-asleep  country  dance  among  them;  all 
were  inspired. 

And  here  is  the  same  scene  as  touched  by  Keats: — 

We  were  greatly  amused  by  a  country  dancing-school  holden 
at  the  Tun,  it  was  indeed  'no  new  cotillon  fresh  from  France.' 
No,  they  kickit  and  jumpit  with  mettle  extraordinary,  and 
whiskit,  and  friskit,  and  toed  it  and  go'd  it,  and  twirl'd  it,  and 
whirl'd  it,  and  stamped  it,  and  sweated  it,  tattooing  the  floor 
like  mad.i  The  difference  between  our  country  dances  and 
these  Scottish  figures  is  about  the  same  as  leisurely  stirring  a 

^  Does  the  reader  remember  how  in  a  similar  scene  from  the  other  side 
of  the  Solway,  in  Scott's  Redgauntlet,  Dame  Martin,  leading  the  dance, 
'frisked  like  a  kid,  snapped  her  fingers  like  castanets,  whooped  like  a 
Bacchanal,  and  bounded  from  the  floor  like  a  tennis  ball'? 


278  DUMFRIES 

cup  o'  Tea  and  beating  up  a  batter-pudding.  I  was  extremely 
gratified  to  think  that,  if  I  had  pleasures  they  knew  nothing  of, 
they  had  also  some  into  which  I  could  not  possibly  enter.  I  hope 
I  shall  not  return  without  having  got  the  Highland  fling.  There 
was  as  fine  a  row  of  boys  and  girls  as  you  ever  saw;  some  beautiful 
faces,  and  one  exquisite  mouth.  I  never  felt  so  near  the  glory 
of  Patriotism,  the  glory  of  making  by  any  means  a  country 
happier.     This  is  what  I  like  better  than  scenery. 

From  Ireby  the  friends  walked  by  way  of  Wigton  to 
Carlisle,  arriving  there  on  the  last  day  of  June.  From 
CarHsle  they  took  coach  to  Dumfries;  having  heard  that 
the  intervening  country  was  not  interesting:  neither 
did  Keats  much  admire  what  he  saw  of  it.  Besides  the 
familiar  beauties  of  the  home  counties  of  England,  two 
ideals  of  landscape  had  haunted  and  allured  his  imagin- 
ation almost  equally,  that  of  the  classic  south,  har- 
monious and  sunned  and  gay,  and  that  of  the  shadowed, 
romantic  and  adventurous  north;  and  the  Scottish 
border,  with  its  bleak  and  moorish  rain-swept  distances, 
its  ^huddle  of  cold  old  grey  hills'  (the  phrase  is  Steven- 
son's) struck  him  somehow  as  answering  to  neither.  ^I 
know  not  how  it  is,  the  clouds,  the  sky,  the  houses,  all 
seem  anti-Grecian  and  anti-Charlemagnish.' 

So  writes  Keats  from  Dumfries,  where  they  visited 
the  tomb  of  Burns  and  the  ruins  of  Lincluden  College, 
and  where  Keats  expressed  his  sense  of  foreignness  and 
dreamlike  discomfort  in  a  sonnet  interesting  as  the  record 
of  a  mood  but  of  small  merit  poetically.  Brown  also,  a 
Scotsman  from  the  outer  Hebrides,  as  he  believed,  by 
descent,  but  by  habit  and  education  purely  English, 
felt  himself  at  first  an  alien  in  the  Scottish  Lowlands. 
On  this  stage  of  the  walk  they  were  both  unpleasurably 
struck  by  the  laughterless  gravity  and  cold  greetings  of 
the  people,  (^more  serious  and  solidly  inanimated  than 
necessary,'  Brown  calls  them)  and  by  the  lack  of  anything 
like  the  English  picturesque  and  gardened  snugness  in 
villages  and  houses:  Brown  also  by  the  barefoot  habit 
of  the  girls  and  women,  but  this  Keats  liked,  expatiating 
to  his  friend  on  the  beauty  of  a  lassie's  natural  uncramped 
foot  and  its  colour  against  the  grass. 


THE  GALLOWAY  COAST  279 

From  Dumfries  they  started  on  July  2  south-westward 
for  Galloway,  a  region  not  overmuch  frequented  even 
now,  and  then  hardly  at  all,  by  tourists:  even  Words- 
worth on  his  several  Scottish  trips  passed  it  by  un- 
explored. Our  travellers  broke  the  journey  first  at 
Dalbeattie:  thence  on  to  Kirkcudbright,  with  a  long 
morning  pause  for  breakfast  and  letter-writing  by  the 
wayside  near  Auchencairn.  Approaching  the  Kirkcud- 
brightshire coast,  with  its  scenery  at  once  wild  and  soft, 
its  embosomed  inlets  and  rocky  tufted  headlands,  its 
high  craggy  moors  towering  inland,  and  its  backward 
views  over  the  glimmering  Solway  to  the  Cumberland 
fells  or  the  hazier  hills  of  Man,  they  began  to  enjoy 
themselves  to  the  full.  Brown  bethought  him  that 
this  was  Guy  Mannering's  country,  and  fell  talking  to 
Keats  about  Meg  Merrilies.  Keats,  who  according  to  the 
fashion  of  his  circle  was  no  enthusiast  for  Scott's  poetry, 
and  of  the  Waverley  novels,  at  this  time  guessed  but  not 
known  to  be  Scott's,  had  read  The  Antiquary  (to  which  he 
whimsically  preferred  Smollett's  Humphrey  Clinker)  but 
not  Guy  Mannering,  was  much  struck  by  what  he  heard. 

I  enjoyed  the  recollection  of  the  events  [writes  Brown]  as  I 
described  them  in  their  own  scenes.  There  was  a  little  spot, 
close  to  our  pathway,  where,  without  a  shadow  of  doubt,  old 
Meg  Merrilies  had  often  boiled  her  kettle,  and,  haply,  cooked  a 
chicken.  It  was  among  fragments  of  rock,  and  brambles,  and 
broom,  and  most  tastefully  ornamented  with  a  profusion  of 
honeysuckle,  wild  roses,  and  fox-glove,  all  in  the  very  blush 
and  fullness  of  blossom.  While  finishing  breakfast,  and  both 
employed  in  writing,  I  could  not  avoid  noticing  that  Keats's 
letter  was  not  running  in  regular  prose.  He  told  me  he  was 
writing  to  his  little  sister,  and  giving  a  ballad  on  old  Meg  for 
her  amusement.  Though  he  called  it  too  much  a  trifle  to  be 
copied,  I  soon  inserted  it  in  my  journal.  It  struck  me  as  a 
good  description  of  that  mystic  link  between  mortality  and  the 
weird  sisters;  and,  at  the  same  time,  in  appropriate  language 
to  the  person  addressed. 

Old  Meg  she  was  a  Gipsy, 

And  liv'd  upon  the  Moors : 
Her  bed  it  was  the  brown  heath  turf 

And  her  house  was  out  of  doors. 


280  MEG  MERRILIES 

Her  apples  were  swart  blackberries. 

Her  currants  pods  o'  broom; 
Her  wine  was  dew  of  the  wild  white  rose. 

Her  book  a  churchyard  tomb. 

Her  Brothers  were  the  craggy  hills,  > 

Her  Sisters  larchen  trees — 
Alone  with  her  great  family 

She  liv'd  as  she  did  please. 

No  breakfast  had  she  many  a  mom. 

No  dinner  many  a  noon. 
And  'stead  of  supper  she  would  stare 

Full  hard  against  the  Moon. 

But  every  mom  of  woodbine  fresh 

She  made  her  garlanding, 
And  every  night  the  dark  glen  Yew 

She  wove,  and  she  would  sing. 

And  with  her  fingers  old  and  brown 

She  plaited  Mats  o'  Rushes, 
And  gave  them  to  the  Cottagers 

She  met  among  the  Bushes. 

Old  Meg  was  brave  as  Margaret  Queen 

And  tall  as  Amazon: 
An  old  red  blanket  cloak  she  wore; 

A  chip  hat  had  she  on. 
God  rest  her  aged  bones  somewhere —    • 

She  died  full  long  agone  I 

Keats  had  in  this  Hrifle/  using  the  ballad  form  for 
the  first  time,  handled  it  with  faultless  tact,  and  though 
leaving  out  the  tragic  features  of  Scott's  creation,  had 
been  able  to  evoke  of  his  own  an  instantaneous  vision 
of  her  in  vitally  conceived  spiritual  relation  with  her 
surroimdings.^  He  copied  the  piece  out  in  letters  written 
in  pauses  of  their  walk  both  to  his  young  sister  and  to 
his  brother  Tom.  The  letter  to  Fanny  Keats  is  full  of 
fun  and  nonsense,  with  a  touch  or  two  which  shews  that 

*  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  the  present  poet  laureate  has  found  some- 
thing in  this  piece  entitling  it  to  a  place  in  his  severely  sifted  anthology, 
The  Spirit  of  Man. 


FLYING  VISIT  TO  BELFAST  281 

he  was  fully  sensitive  to  the  charm  of  the  Galloway 
coast  scenery.  *  Since  I  scribbled  the  Meg  Merrilies 
song  we  have  walked  through  a  beautiful  country  to 
Kirkcudbright — at  which  place  I  wiU  write  you  a  song 
about  myself.'  Then  follows  the  set  of  gay  doggerel 
stanzas  telling  of  various  escapades  of  himself  as  a  child 
and  since, — ^ There  was  a  naughty  boy;'  and  then  the 
excuse  for  them, — ^My  dear  Fanny,  I  am  ashamed  of 
writing  you  such  stuff,  nor  would  I  if  it  were  not  for 
being  tired  after  my  day's  walking,  and  ready  to  tumble 
into  bed  so  fatigued  that  when  I  am  in  bed  you  might 
sew  my  nose  to  my  great  toe  and  trundle  me  round  the 
town,  like  a  Hoop,  without  waking  me.'  It  was  his 
way  on  his  tour,  and  indeed  always,  thus  to  keep  by  him 
the  letters  he  was  writing  and  add  scraps  to  them  as 
the  fancy  took  him.  The  systematic  Brown,  on  the 
other  hand,  wrote  regularly  and  uniformly  in  the 
evenings.  ^He  affronts  my  indolence  and  luxury,' 
says  Keats,  ^by  pulling  out  of  his  knapsack,  first  his 
paper;  secondly  his  pens;  and  last,  his  ink.  Now  I 
would  not  care,  if  he  would  change  a  Httle.  I  say  now, 
why  not  take  out  his  pens  first  sometimes?  But  I 
might  as  well  tell  a  hen  to  hold  up  her  head  before  she 
drinks,  instead  of  afterwards.' 

From  Kirkcudbright  they  walked  on  July  5, — taking 
the  beautiful  coast  road  from  Gatehouse  of  Fleet  and 
passing  where  Cairnsmore  heaves  a  huge  heathered 
shoulder  above  the  fertile  farmlands  of  the  Cree  valley, 
— as  far  as  Newton  Stewart:  thence  across  the  low- 
rolling  Wigtownshire  coimtry  by  Glenluce  to  Stranraer 
and  Portpatrick.  Here  they  took  the  packet  for  Donagh- 
adee  on  the  opposite  coast  of  Ireland,  with  the  intention 
of  seeing  the  Giant's  Causeway,  but  finding  the  distances 
and  expense  much  exceed  their  calculation,  contented 
themselves  with  a  walk  to  Belfast,  and  crossed  back 
again  to  Portpatrick  on  the  third  day.  In  a  letter  to 
his  brother  Tom  written  during  and  immediately  after 
this  excursion,  Keats  has  some  striking  passages  of 
human  observation  and  reflection.    The  change  of  spirit 


282         CONTRASTS  AND  REFLECTIONS 

between  one  generation  and  another  is  forcibly  brought 
home  to  us  when  we  think  of  Johnson,  setting  forth  on 
his  Scottish  tour  forty-five  years  earlier  with  the  study 
of  men,  manners  and  social  conditions  in  his  mind  as 
the  one  aim  worthy  of  a  serious  traveller,  (he  had 
spoken  scoffingly,  not  long  before,  of  the  'prodigious 
noble  wild  prospects'  which  Scotland,  he  understood, 
shared  with  Lapland),  yet  forced  now  and  again  by  the 
power  of  scenery  to  break,  as  it  were  half  ashamedly, 
into  stiff  but  striking  phrases  of  descriptive  admiration; 
and  when  now  we  find  Keats,  carried  northward  by  the 
romantic  passion  and  fashion  of  a  later  day  for  nature 
and  scenery,  compelled  in  his  turn  by  his  innate  human 
instincts  to  forget  the  landscape  and  observe  and 
speculate  upon  problems  of  society  and  economics  and 
racial  character: — 


These  Kirk-men  have  done  Scotland  good.  They  have  made 
men,  women;  old  men,  young  men;  old  women,  young  women; 
boys,  girls;  and  all  infants  careful;  so  that  they  are  formed 
into  regular  Phalanges  of  savers  and  gainers.  Such  a  thrifty 
army  cannot  fail  to  enrich  their  Country,  and  give  it  a  greater 
appearance  of  comfort  than  that  of  their  poor  rash  neighbourhood 
[meaning  Ireland].  These  Kirk-men  have  done  Scotland  harm; 
they  have  banished  puns,  and  laughing,  and  kissing,  etc.,  (except 
in  cases  where  the  very  danger  and  crime  must  make  it  very 
gustful).  I  shall  make  a  full  stop  at  kissing,  .  .  .  and  go  on  to 
remind  you  of  the  fate  of  Burns  poor,  unfortunate  fellow!  his 
disposition  was  Southern!  How  sad  it  is  when  a  luxurious 
imagination  is  obliged,  in  self-defence,  to  deaden  its  delicacy  in 
vulgarity  and  in  things  attainable,  that  it  may  not  have  leisure 
to  go  mad  after  things  that  are  not!  ...  I  have  not  suifficient 
reasoning  faculty  to  settle  the  doctrine  of  thrift,  as  it  is  consistent 
with  the  dignity  of  human  Society — with  the  happiness  of 
Cottagers.  All  I  can  do  is  by  plump  contrasts;  were  the  fingers 
made  to  squeeze  a  guinea  or  a  white  hand? — were  the  lips  made 
to  hold  a  pen  or  a  kiss  ?  and  yet  in  Cities  man  is  shut  out  from 
his  fellows  if  he  is  poor — the  cottager  must  be  very  dirty,  and 
very  wretched,  if  she  be  not  thrifty — the  present  state  of  society 
demands  this,  and  this  convinces  me  that  the  world  is  very 
young,  and  in  a  very  ignorant  state.  We  live  in  a  barbarous 
age — I  would  sooner  be  a  wild  deer,  than  a  girl  under  the 
dominion  of  the  Kirk;  and  I  would  sooner  be  a  wild  hog,  than  be 


THE  DUCHESS  OF  DUNGHILL  283 

the  occasion  of  a  poor  Creature's  penance  before  those  execrable 
elders. 

Here  is  an  impression  received  in  Ireland,  followed  by 
a  promise,  which  was  fulfilled  a  few  days  later  with 
remarkable  shrewdness  and  insight,  of  further  consider- 
ations on  the  contrasts  between  the  Irish  character  and 
the  Scottish: — 

On  our  return  from  Belfast  we  met  a  sedan — the  Duchess  of 
Dunghill.  It  was  no  laughing  matter  though.  Imagine  the 
worst  dog-kennel  you  ever  saw,  placed  upon  two  poles  from  a 
mouldy  fencing.  In  such  a  wretched  thing  sat  a  squalid  old 
woman,  squat  like  an  ape  half-starved  from  a  scarcity  of  biscuit 
in  its  passage  from  Madagascar  to  the  Cape,  with  a  pipe  in  her 
mouth  and  looking  out  with  a  round-eyed,  skinny-lidded  inanity, 
with  a  sort  of  horizontal  idiotic  movement  of  her  head:  squat 
and  lean  she  sat,  and  puffed  out  the  smoke,  while  two  ragged, 
tattered  girls  carried  her  along.  What  a  thing  would  be  a  history 
of  her  life  and  sensations;  I  shall  endeavour  when  I  have  thought 
a  little  more,  to  give  you  my  idea  of  the  difference  between  the 
Scotch  and  Irish. 

From  Stranraer  the  friends  made  straight  for  Burns's 
country,  walking  along  the  coast  by  Ballantrae,  Girvan, 
Kirkoswald  and  Maybole  (the  same  walk  that  Stevenson 
took  the  reverse  way  in  the  winter  of  1876)  to  Ayr. 
Brown  grows  especially  lyrical,  and  Keats  more  enthu- 
siastic than  usual,  over  the  beauty  of  the  first  day's  walk 
from  Stranraer  by  Cairn  Ryan  and  Glen  App,  with 
Ailsa  Craig  suddenly  looming  up  through  showers  after 
they  topped  the  pass: — 

When  we  left  Cairn  [writes  Keats]  our  Road  lay  half  way  up 
the  sides  of  a  green  mountainous  shore,  full  of  clefts  of  verdure 
and  eternally  varying — sometimes  up  sometimes  down,  and  over 
little  Bridges  going  across  green  chasms  of  moss,  rock  and  trees — 
winding  about  everywhere.  After  two  or  three  Miles  of  this  we 
turned  suddenly  into  a  magnificent  glen  finely  wooded  in  Parts 
— seven  Miles  long — with  a  Mountain  stream  winding  down  the 
Midst — full  of  cottages  in  the  most  happy  situations — the  sides 
of  the  Hills  covered  with  sheep — the  effect  of  cattle  lowing  I 
never  had  so  finely.  At  the  end  we  had  a  gradual  ascent  and 
got  among  the  tops  of  the  Mountains  whence  in  a  little  time  I 
descried  in  the  Sea  Ailsa  Rock  940  feet  high — it  was  15  Miles 


284  THE  AYRSHIRE  COAST 

distant  and  seemed  close  upon  us.  The  effect  of  Ailsa  with  the 
pecuHar  perspective  of  the  Sea  in  connection  with  the  ground  we 
stood  on,  and  the  misty  rain  then  faUing  gave  me  a  complete 
Idea  of  a  deluge.  Ailsa  struck  me  very  suddenly — really  I  was 
a  little  alarmed. 

Less  vivid  than  the  above  is  the  invocatory  sonnet, 
apparently  showing  acquaintance  with  the  geological 
theor}^  of  volcanic  upheaval,  which  Keats  was  presently 
moved  to  address  To  Ailsa  Rock.  Coming  down  into 
BaUantrae  in  blustering  weather,  the  friends  met  a 
country  wedding  party  on  horseback,  and  Keats  tried 
a  song  about  it  in  the  Burns  dialect,  for  Brown  to  palm 
off  on  Dilke  as  an  original:  'but  it  won^t  do,'  he  rightly 
decides.  From  Maybole  he  writes  to  Reynolds  with 
pleased  anticipation  of  the  visit  to  be  paid  the  next  day 
to  Burns's  cottage.  'One  of  the  pleasantest  means  of 
annulling  self  is  approaching  such  a  shrine  as  the  cottage 
of  Burns — we  need  not  think  of  his  misery — that  is  all 
gone — ^bad  luck  to  it — I  shall  look  upon  it  all  with 
unmixed  pleasure,  as  I  do  upon  my  Stratford-on-Avon 
day  with  Bailey.'  On  the  walk  from  Maybole  to  Ayr 
Keats  has  almost  the  only  phrase  which  escapes  him 
during  the  whole  tour  to  indicate  a  sense  of  special 
inspiring  power  in  mountain  scenery  for  a  poet: — 'The 
approach  to  it  [Ayr]  is  extremely  fine — quite  outwent 
my  expectations — ^richly  meadowed,  wooded,  heathed, 
and  rivuleted — ^with  a  Grand  Sea  view  terminated  by 
the  black  mountains  of  the  Isle  of  Arran.  As  soon  as 
I  saw  them  so  nearly  I  said  to  myself,  "How  is  it  they 
did  not  beckon  Burns  to  some  grand  attempt  at  an 
Epic.'''  Nearing  Kirk  Alio  way,  Keats  had  been 
delighted  to  find  the  first  home  of  Burns  in  a  landscape 
so  charming.  'I  endeavoured  to  drink  in  the  Prospect, 
that  I  might  spin  it  out  to  you,  as  the  Silkworm  makes 
sHk  from  Mulberry  leaves — I  cannot  recollect  it.'  But 
his  anticipations  were  deceived,  the  whole  scene  dis- 
enchanted, and  thoughts  of  Burns's  misery  forced  on 
him  in  his  own  despite,  by  the  presence  and  chatter  of 
the  man  in  charge  of  the  poet's  birthplace: — 


IN  BURNS'S  COTTAGE  285 

The  Man  at  the  Cottage  was  a  great  Bore  with  his  Anecdotes 
— I  hate  the  rascal — his  Hfe  consists  in  fuz,  fuzzy,  fuzziest.  He 
drinks  glasses  five  for  the  Quarter  and  twelve  for  the  hour — he  is 
a  mahogany-faced  old  Jackass  who  knew  Burns.  He  ought  to 
have  been  kicked  for  having  spoken  to  him.  He  calls  himself 
*a  curious  old  Bitch' — but  he  is  a  flat  old  dog — I  should  like  to 
employ  Caliph  Vathek  to  kick  him.  O  the  flummery  of  a  birth- 
place !  Cant !  cant !  cant !  It  is  enough  to  give  a  spirit  the 
guts-ache.  Many  a  true  word,  they  say,  is  spoken  in  jest — this 
may  be  because  his  gab  hindered  my  sublimity:  the  flat  dog 
made  me  write  a  flat  sonnet.  My  dear  Reynolds — I  cannot 
write  about  scenery  and  visitings — Fancy  is  indeed  less  than  a 
present  palpable  reaHty,  but  it  is  greater  than  remembrance — 
you  would  lift  your  eyes  from  Homer  only  to  see  close  before 
you  the  real  Isle  of  Tenedos — ^you  would  rather  read  Homer 
afterwards  than  remember  yourself.  One  song  of  Burns's  is  of 
more  worth  to  you  than  all  I  could  think  for  a  whole  year  in  his 
native  country.  His  Misery  is  a  dead  weight  upon  the  nimble- 
ness  of  one's  quill — I  tried  to  forget  it — to  drink  Toddy  without 
any  Care — to  write  a  merry  sonnet — it  won't  do — he  talked 
with  Bitches — he  drank  with  blackguards,  he  was  miserable. 
We  can  see  horribly  clear,  in  the  works  of  such  a  Man  his  whole 
life,  as  if  we  were  God's  spies.^  What  were  his  addresses  to  Jean 
in  the  latter  part  of  his  life? 


A  little  further  back  Keats  had  written,  'my  head  is 
sometimes  in  such  a  whirl  in  considering  the  million 
likings  and  antipathies  of  our  Moments  that  I  can  get 
into  no  settled  strain  in  my  Letters.'  But  their  strag- 
gling, careless  tissue  is  threaded  with  such  strands  of 
genius  and  fresh  hiunan  wisdom  that  one  often  wonders 
whether  they  are  not  legacies  of  this  rare  young  spirit 
equally  precious  with  the  poems  themselves.  Certainly 
their  prose  is  better  than  most  of  the  verse  which  he 
had  strength  or  leisure  to  write  diuing  this  Scottish 
tour.  As  the  two  friends  tramped  among  the  Highland 
mountains  some  days  later  Keats  composed  with  con- 
siderable pains  (as  Brown  particularly  mentions)  the 
lines  beginning  'There  is  a  charm  in  footing  slow  across 
a  silent  plain,'  intended  to  express  the  temper  in  which 
his  pilgrimage  through  and  beyond  the  Burns  country 

*  The  words  are  King  Lear's  (act  v,  sc.  iii). 


286  LINES  ON  HIS  PILGRIMAGE 

had  been  made.  They  are  written  in  the  long  iambic 
fourteeners  of  Chapman's  Iliad,  a  metre  not  touched 
by  Keats  elsewhere,  and  perhaps  chosen  to  convey  a 
sense  of  the  sustained  continuous  trudge  of  his  wayfaring. 
They  are  very  interesting  as  an  attempt  to  capture  and 
fix  in  words  certain  singular,  fluctuating  intensities  of 
the  poet's  mood — ^the  pressure  of  a  great  and  tragic 
memory  absorbing  his  whole  consciousness  and  deadening 
all  sense  of  outward  things  as  he  nears  the  place  of 
pilgrimage — and  afterwards  his  momentary  panic  lest  the 
spell  of  mighty  scenery  and  associations  may  be  too 
overpowering  and  drag  his  soul  adrift  from  its  moorings 
of  every-day  habit  and  affection — ^from  the  ties  of  'the 
sweet  and  bitter  world' — ^of  Brother's  eyes,  of  Sister's 
brow.'  In  some  of  the  lines  expressing  these  obscure 
disturbances  of  the  soul  there  is  a  deep  smouldering 
fire,  but  hardly  ever  that  touch  of  absolute  felicity 
which  is  the  note  of  Keats's  work  when  he  is  quite  him- 
self. The  best,  technically  speaking,  are  those  which 
tell  of  the  pilgrim's  absorbed  mood  of  expectant  approach 
to  his  goal : — 


Light  heather-bells  may  tremble  then  but  they  are  far  away; 

Wood-lark  may  sing  from  sandy  fern, — the  Sun  may  hear  his  lay; 

Runnels  may  kiss  the  grass  on  shelves  and  shallows  clear, 

But  their  low  voices  are  not  heard,  though  come  on  travels  drear; 

Blood-red  the  Sun  may  set  behind  black  mountain  peaks; 

Blue  tides  may  sluice  and  drench  their  time  in  caves  and  weedy 

creeks; 
Eagles  may  seem  to  sleep  wing-wide  upon  the  air; 
Ring-doves  may  fly  convuls'd  across  to  some  high-cedar'd  lair; 
But  the  forgotten  eye  is  still  fast  lidded  to  the  ground, 
As  Palmer's,  that  with  weariness,  mid-desert  shrine  hath  found. 
At  such  a  time  the  soul's  a  child,  in  childhood  is  the  brain; 
Forgotten  is  the  worldly  heart — alone,  it  beats  in  vain. —  * 

*  This  metre  is  essentially  the  same  as  the  'common'  measure,  eight  and 
six,  of  the  hymn-books,  only  printed  out  in  single  lines  to  be  spoken 
without — or  with  only  very  slight — pause.  At  the  point  quoted  Keats  varies 
it,  whether  carelessly  or  on  purpose,  and  the  first  lines  of  three  successive 
couplets,  beginning  from  'Runnels,'  etc.,  are  not  in  fourteeners  but  in 
twelves  or  Alexandrines  (  = 'short  measure,'  six  and  six,  printed  out). 
A  similar  variation  is  frequent  in  early  examples  of  the  metre. 


THROUGH  GLASGOW  TO  LOCH  LOMOND    287 

Keats  makes  it  clear  that  he  did  not  write  these  lines 
until  some  days  after  he  had  left  Bmiis^s  comitry  and 
was  well  on  into  the  heart  of  the  Highlands,  and  we  get 
what  reads  like  the  prose  of  some  of  them  in  a  letter 
written  to  Tom  on  the  last  stage  of  his  walk  before 
reaching  Oban.  Meantime  the  friends  had  passed 
through  Glasgow,  of  which  they  had  nothing  to  say 
except  that  they  were  taken,  not  for  the  first  time,  for 
pedlars  by  reason  of  their  knapsacks,  and  Brown  in 
particular  for  a  spectacle-seller  by  reason  of  his  glasses, 
and  that  the  whole  population  seemed  to  have  turned 
out  to  stare  at  them.  A  drunken  man  in  the  street, 
accosting  Keats  with  true  Glaswegian  lack  of  ceremony, 
vowed  he  had  seen  all  kinds  of  foreigners  but  never  the 
like  o'  him:  a  remark  perhaps  not  to  be  wondered  at 
when  we  recall  Mrs  Dilke^s  description  of  Keats's  appear- 
ance when  he  came  home  (see  the  end  of  this  chapter) 
and  Brown's  account  of  his  own  weird  toggery  as 
follows: — 'a  thick  stick  in  my  hand,  the  knapsack 
on  my  back,  "with  spectacles  on  nose,''  a  white  hat, 
a  tartan  coat  and  trousers  and  a  Highland  plaid  thrown 
over  my  shoulders.'  From  Glasgow  they  walked  by 
Dumbarton  through  the  Loch  Lomond  coimtry,  roimd 
the  head  of  Loch  Fyne  to  Inverary,  thence  down  the 
side  and  round  the  south-west  end  of  Loch  Awe  and  so 
past  the  head  of  Loch  Craignish  to  the  coast.  At  his 
approach  to  the  lower  end  of  Loch  Lomond  Keats  had 
thought  the  scene  'precious  good;'  but  his  sense  of 
romance  was  disturbed  by  finding  it  so  frequented. 
'Steamboats  on  Loch  Lomond  and  Barouches  on  its 
sides  take  a  Httle  from  the  pleasure  of  such  romantic 
chaps  as  Brown  and  I. '  If  the  scene  were  to  be  peopled 
he  would  prefer  that  it  were  by  another  kind  of  denizen. 
'The  Evening  was  beautiful,  nothing  could  surpass  our 
fortune  in  the  weather — ^yet  was  I  worldly  enough  to 
wish  for  a  fleet  of  chivalry  Barges  with  Trumpets  and 
Banners  just  to  die  away  before  me  into  that  blue  place 
among  the  moimtains' — and  here  follows  a  little  sketch 
of  the  narrow  upper  end  of  the  lake  from  near  Tarbet, 


288  A  CONFESSION 

just  to  show  where  the  blue  place  was.  At  Inverary 
Keats  has  a  word  about  the  woods  which  reminds  one 
of  Coleridge^s  Kuhla  Khan — Hhe  woods  seem  old  enough 
to  remember  two  or  three  changes  in  the  Crags  above 
them' — and  then  goes  on  to  tell  how  he  has  been  amused 
and  exasperated  by  a  performance  of  The  Stranger  to  an 
accompaniment  of  bagpipe  music.  Bathing  in  Loch 
Fjne  the  next  morning,  he  got  horribly  bitten  by  gad- 
flies, and  vented  his  smart  in  a  set  of  doggerel  rhymes. 
Of  all  these  matters  he  gossips  gaily  for  the  entertain- 
ment of  the  invalid  Tom.  Turning  on  the  same  day  to 
write  to  Benjamin  Bailey,  the  most  serious-minded  of 
his  friends,  he  proceeds  in  a  strain  of  considerate  self- 
knowledge  to  confess  and  define  some  of  the  morbid 
elements  in  his  own  nature.  That  Bailey  may  be  warned 
against  taking  any  future  complainings  of  his  too 
seriously,  'I  carry  all  matters,'  he  says,  Ho  an  extreme 
— so  that  when  I  have  any  little  vexation,  it  grows  in 
five  minutes  into  a  theme  for  Sophocles.'  And  then  by 
way  of  accoimting  for  his  having  failed  of  late  to  see 
much  of  the  Reynolds  sisters  in  Little  Britain,  he  lays 
bare  his  reasons  for  thinking  himself  unfit  for  ordinary- 
society  and  especially  for  the  society  of  women: — 

I  am  certain  I  have  not  a  right  feeling  towards  women — at 
this  moment  I  am  striving  to  be  just  to  them,  but  I  cannot.  Is 
it  because  they  fall  so  far  beneath  my  boyish  imagination? 
When  I  was  a  schoolboy  I  thought  a  fair  woman  a  pure  Goddess, 
my  mind  was  a  soft  nest  in  which  some  one  of  them  slept,  though 
she  knew  it  not.  I  have  no  right  to  expect  more  than  their 
reality — I  thought  them  ethereal  above  men — I  find  them  perhaps 
equal — great  by  comparison  is  very  small.  Insult  may  be 
inflicted  in  more  ways  than  by  word  or  action.  One  who  is 
tender  of  being  insulted  does  not  like  to  think  an  insult  against 
another.  .1  do  not  like  to  think  insults  in  a  lady's  company — 
I  commit  a  crime  with  her  which  absence  would  not  have  known. 
...  I  must  absolutely  get  over  this — but  how?  the  only  way  is 
to  find  the  root  of  the  evil,  and  so  cure  it  *  with  backward  mutters 
of  dissevering  power' — that  is  a  difficult  thing;  for  an  obstinate 
Prejudice  can  seldom  be  produced  but  from  a  gordian  complica- 
tion of  feelings,  which  must  take  time  to  unravel,  and  care  to 
keep  unravelled. 


LOCH  AWE  TO  THE  COAST  289 

And  then,  as  to  his  present  doings  and  impressions: — 

I  should  not  have  consented  to  myself  these  four  months 
tramping  in  the  highlands,  but  that  I  thought  it  would  give  me 
more  experience,  rub  off  more  prejudice,  use  me  to  more  hard- 
ships, identify  finer  scenes,  load  me  with  grander  mountains, 
and  strengthen  more  my  reach  in  Poetry,  than  would  stopping 
at  home  among  books,  even  though  I  should  reach  Homer.  By 
this  time  I  am  comparatively  a  Mountaineer.  I  have  been  among 
wilds  and  mountains  too  much  to  break  out  much  about  their 
grandeur.  I  have  fed  upon  oat-cake — not  long  enough  to  be 
very  much  attached  to  it. — The  first  mountains  I  saw,  though 
not  so  large  as  some  I  have  since  seen,  weighed  very  solemnly 
upon  me.     The  effect  is  wearing  away — ^yet  I  like  them  mainly. 

The  word  'identify'  in  the  above  is  noticeable,  as 
seeming  to  imply  that  the  fruit  of  his  travel  was  not 
discovery,  but  only  the  recognition  of  scenes  already 
fully  preconceived  in  his  imagination.  Resuming  his 
letter  to  Tom  at  a  later  stage,  he  tells  of  things  that 
have  impressed  him :  how  in  Glencroe  ^  they  had  been 
pleased  with  the  noise  of  shepherds'  sheep  and  dogs  in 
the  misty  heights  close  above  them,  but  could  see  none 
of  them  for  some  time,  till  two  came  in  sight  'creeping 
among  the  crags  like  Emmets,'  yet  their  voices  plainly 
audible:  how  solenm  was  the  first  sight  of  Loch  Awe 
as  they  approached  it  'along  a  complete  mountain 
road'  (that  is  by  way  of  Glen  Aray)  'where  if  one 
listened  there  was  not  a  sound  but  that  of  mountain 
streams';  how  they  tramped  twenty  miles  by  the  loch 
side  and  how  the  next  day  they  had  reached  the  coast 
within  view  of  Long  Island  (that  is  Luing;  the  spot 
was  probably  Kilmelfort).  It  is  at  this  point  we  get 
the  prose  of  some  of  the  lines  quoted  above  from  the 
verses  expressing  the  temper  of  his  pilgrimage: — 

Our  walk  was  of  this  description — the  near  Hills  were  not  very 
lofty  but  many  of  them  steep,  beautifully  wooded — the  distant 
Mountains  in  the  Hebrides  very  grand,  the  Saltwater  Lakes 
coming  up  between  Crags  and  Islands  full  tide  and  scarcely 
ruffled — sometimes  appearing  as  one  large  Lake  sometimes  as 

*  Printed  in  error  'Glenside'  in  all  the  editions:  but  the  MS.  is  quite 
clear,  and  even  were  it  not  so  topography  would  require  Glencroe. 


290  HARDSHIPS 

three  distinct  ones  in  different  directions.  At  one  point  we  saw 
afar  off  a  rocky  opening  into  the  main  sea. — We  have  also  seen 
an  Eagle  or  two.  They  move  about  without  the  least  motion 
of  Wings  when  in  an  indolent  fit. 

At  the  same  point  occur  for  the  first  time  complaints, 
slight  at  first,  of  fatigue  and  discomfort.  At  the  begin- 
ning of  his  tour  Keats  had  written  to  his  sister  of  its 
effects  upon  his  appetite:  'I  get  so  hungry  a  ham  goes 
but  a  very  little  way  and  fowls  are  like  larks  to  me. 
...  I  can  eat  a  bull's  head  as  easily  as  I  used  to  do  bull's 
eyes.'  Some  days  later  he  writes  that  he  is  getting  used 
to  it,  and  doing  his  twenty  miles  or  more  a  day  without 
inconvenience.  But  now,  in  the  remoter  parts  of  the 
Highlands,  the  hard  accommodation  and  monotonous  diet 
and  rough  journeys  and  frequent  drenchings  begin  to 
tell  upon  both  him  and  Brown: — 

Last  night  poor  Brown  with  his  feet  blistered  and  scarcely 
able  to  walk,  after  a  trudge  of  20  Miles  down  the  side  of  Loch 
Awe  had  no  supper  but  Eggs  and  oat  Cake — we  have  lost  the  sight 
of  white  bread  entirely — Now  we  had  eaten  nothing  but  eggs  all 
day — about  10  a  piece  and  they  had  become  sickening — To-day 
we  have  fared  rather  better — but  no  oat  Cake  wanting — we  had 
a  small  chicken  and  even  a  good  bottle  of  Port  but  altogether 
the  fare  is  too  coarse — I  feel  it  a  little. 

Our  travellers  seem  to  have  felt  the  hardships  of  the 
Highlands  more  than  either  Wordsworth  and  his  sister 
Dorothy  when  they  visited  the  same  scenes  just  fifteen 
years  earlier,  or  Lockhart  and  his  brother  in  their 
expedition,  only  three  years  before,  to  the  loneliest 
wilds  of  Lochaber.  But  then  the  Wordsworth  party 
only  walked  when  they  wished,  and  drove  much  of  the 
way  in  their  ramshackle  jaunting-car;  and  the  Loch- 
harts,  being  fishermen,  had  their  rods,  and  had  besides 
brought  portable  soup  with  them  and  a  horse  to  carry 
their  kit.  Lockhart's  account  of  his  experience  is  in 
curious  contrast  with  those  of  Keats  and  Brown: — 

We  had  a  horse  with  us  for  the  convenience  of  carrying  baggage 
— but  contemning  the  paths  of  civilized  man,  we  dared  the 
deepest  glens  in  search  of  trout.    There  is  something  abundantly 


KERRERA  AND  MULL  291 

delightful  in  the  warmheartedness  of  the  Highland  people.  Bating 
the  article  of  inquisitiveness,  they  are  as  polite  as  courtiers.  The 
moment  we  entered  a  cottage  the  wife  began  to  bake  her  cakes — 
and  having  portable  soup  with  us,  our  fare  was  really  excellent. 
What  think  you  of  porritch  and  cream  for  breakfast?  trout, 
pike,  and  herrings  for  dinner,  and  right  peat-reek  whisky? 

Arrived  at  Oban  by  way  of  the  Melfort  pass  and  Glen 
Euchar,  the  friends  imdertook  one  journey  in  especial 
which  proved  too  much  for  Keats's  strength.  Finding 
the  regular  tourist  route  by  water  to  Staffa  and  lona 
too  expensive  for  their  frugal  scheme  of  travel,  they  were 
persuaded  to  take  the  ferry  to  the  isle  of  Kerrera  and 
thence  on  to  the  hither  shore  of  Mull.  Did  Keats  in 
crossing  Kerrera  hear  of — ^he  would  scarcely  have 
travelled  out  of  his  way  to  visit — the  ruins  of  the  castle 
of  Goylen  on  its  precipice  above  the  sea,  with  its  legend 
of  the  girl-child,  unaccountably  puny  as  was  thought, 
who  turned  out  to  be  really  the  fairy  mistress  of  a 
gentleman  of  Ireland,  and  being  detected  as  such  threw 
herself  headlong  from  the  window  into  the  waves?  and 
was  this  scene  with  its  story  in  his  mind  when  he  wrote 
of  forlorn  fairy  lands  where  castle  casements  open  on 
the  foam  of  perilous  seas  ?  ^  From  the  landing  place 
in  Mull  they  had  to  take  a  guide  and  traverse  on 
foot  the  whole  width  of  the  island  to  the  extreme 
point  of  the  Ross  of  Mull  opposite  lona:  a  wretched 
walk,  as  Keats  calls  it,  of  some  thirty-seven  miles, 
over  difficult  ground  and  in  the  very  roughest  weather, 
broken  by  one  night's  rest  in  a  shepherd's  hut  at  a 
spot  he  calls  Dun  an  Cullen, — ^perhaps  for  Derryna- 
cullen.  Having  crossed  the  narrow  channel  to  lona 
and  admired  the  antiquities  of  that  illustrious  island 
(the  epithet  is  Johnson's),  they  chartered  a  fresh  boat 
for  the  trip  to  Staffa  and  thence  up  Loch  na  Keal,  so 

1  See  John  Campbell  of  Islay,  Popular  Tales  of  the  West  Highlands  (1860), 
vol.  ii,  p.  52.  I  owe  the  suggestion  and  the  reference  to  my  friend  Prof. 
W.  P.  Ker.  Personally  I  have  always  associated  the  magic  casements 
with  the  Enchanted  Castle  of  Claude's  picture  representing  a  very  different 
scene.  But  the  poet's  mind  is  a  crucible  made  for  extracting  from  ingre- 
dients no  matter  how  heterogeneous  the  quintessence,  the  elixir,  which  it 
needs. 


292  STAFFA 

landing  on  the  return  journey  in  the  heart  of  Mull 
and  shortening  their  walk  back  across  the  island  by 
more  than  half.  By  the  power  of  the  past  and  its 
associations  among  the  monastic  ruins  of  lona,  and  of 
nature's  architecture  in  building  and  scooping  the 
basaltic  columns  of  Fingal's  Cave,  Keats  shows  himself 
naturally  impressed.  In  this  instance,  and  once  or 
twice  afterwards,  he  exerts  himself  to  write  a  full  and 
precise  description  for  the  benefit  of  his  brother  Tom. 
In  doing  so  he  uses  a  phrase  which  indicates  a  running 
of  his  thoughts  upon  his  projected  poem,  Hyperion: — 

The  finest  thing  is  Fingal's  cave — it  is  entirely  a  hollowing 
out  of  Basalt  Pillars.  Suppose  now  the  Giants  who  rebelled 
against  Jove  had  taken  a  whole  Mass  of  black  Columns  and  bound 
them  together  like  bunches  of  matches — and  then  with  immense 
Axes  had  made  a  cavern  in  the  body  of  these  Columns — of  course 
the  roof  and  floor  must  be  composed  of  the  broken  ends  of  the 
Columns — such  is  FingaFs  cave  except  that  the  Sea  has  done 
the  work  of  excavations  and  is  continually  dashing  there — so 
that  we  walk  along  the  sides  of  the  cave  on  the  pillars  which 
are  left  as  if  for  convenient  stairs — the  roof  is  arched  somewhat 
gothic-wise  and  the  length  of  some  of  the  entire  side-pillars  is 
50  feet.  .  .  .  The  colour  of  the  columns  is  a  sort  of  black  with  a 
lurking  gloom  of  purple  therein.  For  solemnity  and  grandeur 
it  far  surpasses  the  finest  Cathedral. 

More  characteristically  than  this  description,  some 
verses  he  sends  at  the  same  time  tell  how  Fingal's  cave 
and  its  profanation  by  the  race  of  tourists  affected  him: 
I  mean  those  beginning  'Not  Aladdin  Magian,'  written 
in  the  seven-syllable  metre  which  he  handled  almost  as 
well  as  his  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  century  masters, 
from  Fletcher  and  Ben  Jonson  to  the  youthful  Milton. 
Avoiding  word-painting  and  description,  like  the  born 
poet  he  is,  he  begins  by  calling  up  for  comparison  visions 
of  other  fanes  or  palaces  of  enchantment,  and  then, 
bethinking  himself  of  Milton's  cry  to  Lycidas, 

where'er  thy  bones  are  hurlM, 
Whether  beyond  the  stormy  Hebrides — 

he  imagines  that  lost  one  to  have  been  found  by  the 
divinity  of  Ocean  and  put  by  him  in  charge  of  this 


A  SEA  CATHEDRAL  293 

cathedral  of  his  building.  In  his  priestly  character 
Lycidas  tells  his  latter-day  visitant  of  the  religion  of 
the  place,  complains  of  the  violation  of  its  soUtude,  and 
then  dives  suddenly  from  view.  In  the  six  lines  which 
tell  of  the  scene's  profanation  the  style  sinks  with  the 
theme  into  flat  triviahty: — 

So  for  ever  will  I  leave 
Such  a  taint  and  soon  unweave 
All  the  magic  of  the  place, 
Tis  now  free  to  stupid  face. 
To  cutters  and  to  Fashion  boats. 
To  cravats  and  to  Petticoats: — 
The  great  sea  shall  war  it  down. 
For  its  fame  shall  not  be  blown 
At  each  farthing  Quadrille  dance. 
So  saying  with  a  Spirit  glance 
He  dived — . 

Keats  evidently,  and  no  wonder,  did  not  like  those  six 
lines  from  'Tis  now  free'  to  'dance':  in  transcripts 
by  his  friends  they  are  dropped  out  or  inserted  only  in 
pencil:  but  he  apparently  did  not  see  his  way  to  mend 
them,  and  Brown  tells  us  he  could  never  persuade  him 
to  finish  or  resume  the  poem.  In  the  broken  close  as 
he  left  it  there  is  after  all  an  appropriate  abruptness 
which  may  content  us. 

From  the  exertion  and  exposure  which  he  underwent 
on  his  Scottish  torn*,  and  especially  in  this  Mull  expedi- 
tion, are  to  be  traced  the  first  distinct  and  settled 
s^Tnptoms  of  failure  in  Keats's  health,  which  by  reason 
of  his  muscular  vigour  had  to  his  friends  hitherto  seemed 
so  robust,  and  of  the  development  of  his  hereditary  ten- 
dency to  consumption.  In  the  same  letter  to  his  brother 
Tom  which  contains  the  transcript  of  the  Fingal  poem  he 
speaks  of  a  'slight  sore  throat,' — ^Brown  calls  it  a  violent 
cold, — ^which  compelled  him  to  rest  for  a  day  or  two  at 
Oban.  Thence  they  pushed  on  in  broken  weather  by 
Ballachulish  and  the  shore  of  Loch  Linnhe  to  Fort 
WiUiam,  and  from  thence  groped  and  struggled  up  Ben 
Nevis,  a  toilsome  climb  at  best,  in  a  dissolving  mist. 
Once  again  Keats  makes  an  exceptional  endeavour  to 


294  BEN  NEVIS 

realise  the  scene  in  words  for  his  brother's  benefit, 
teUing  of  the  continual  shifting  and  opening  and 
closing  and  re-opening  of  the  cloud  veils  about  them; 
and  to  clench  his  effect  adds,  ^  There  is  not  a  more  fickle 
thing  than  the  top  of  a  Mountain — what  would  a  Lady 
give  to  change  her  headdress  as  often  and  with  as  little 
trouble  ? '  Seated,  so  Brown  tells  us,  almost  on  the  edge 
of  a  precipice  of  fifteen  hundred  feet  drop,  Keats  com- 
posed a  sonnet,  above  his  worst  but  much  below  his 
best,  turning  the  experience  of  the  hour  into  a  simple 
enough  symbol  of  his  own  mental  state  in  face  of  the 
great  mysteries  of  things: — 

Read  me  a  lesson,  Muse,  and  speak  it  loud 

Upon  the  top  of  Nevis,  blind  in  mist ! 
I  look  into  the  chasms,  and  a  shroud 

Vap'rous  doth  hide  them, — ^just  so  much  I  wist 
Mankind  do  know  of  hell;  I  look  o'erhead. 

And  there  is  sullen  mist, — even  so  much 
Mankind  can  tell  of  heaven;  mist  is  spread 

Before  the  earth,  beneath  me, — even  such. 
Even  so  vague  is  man's  sight  of  himself ! 

Here  are  the  craggy  stones  beneath  my  feet, — 
Thus  much  I  know  that,  a  poor  witless  elf, 

I  tread  on  them, — that  all  my  eye  doth  meet 
Is  mist  and  crag,  not  only  on  this  height. 
But  in  the  world  of  thought  and  mental  might ! 

Hearing  of  a  previous  ascent  by  a  Mrs  Cameron,  'the 
fattest  woman  in  all  Inverness-shire,'  he  had  the  energy 
to  compose  also  for  Tom's  amusement  a  comic  dialogue 
in  verse  between  the  mountain  and  the  lady,  much  more 
in  Brown's  vein  than  in  his  own.  By  the  6th  of  August 
the  travellers  had  reached  Inverness,  having  tramped, 
as  Brown  calculates,  six  hundred  and  forty-two  roiles 
since  leaving  Lancaster. 

Keats's  throat  had  for  some  time  been  getting  worse : 
the  ascent,  and  especially  the  descent,  of  Ben  Nevis 
had,  as  he  confesses,  shaken  and  tried  him:  feverish 
symptoms  set  in,  and  the  doctor  whom  he  consulted 
at  Inverness  thought  his  condition  seriously  threatening, 
and  forbade  him  to  continue  his  tour.    Accordingly  he 


TOUR  CUT  SHORT  295 

gave  up  the  purpose  with  which  he  had  set  out  of  footing 
it  southward  by  a  different  route,  seeing  Edinburgh,  and 
on  his  way  home  visiting  Bailey  at  his  curacy  in  Cumber- 
land, and  decided  to  take  passage  at  once  for  London  by 
the  next  packet  from  Cromarty.  Dilke  had  in  the 
meantime  felt  compelled  to  write  and  recall  him  on 
account  of  a  sudden  change  for  the  worse  in  the  con- 
dition of  the  invalid  Tom,  so  that  his  tour  with  Brown 
would  have  been  cut  short  in  any  case.  On  their  way 
round  the  head  of  Beauly  Firth  to  Cromarty  the  friends 
did  not  miss  the  opportunity  of  visiting  the  ruins  of 
Beauly  Abbey.  The  interior  was  then  and  for  long 
afterwards  used  as  a  burial  place  and  receptacle  for 
miscellaneous  rubbish.  Their  attention  being  drawn 
to  a  heap  of  skulls  which  they  took,  probably  on  the 
information  of  some  local  guide,  for  skulls  of  ancient 
monks  of  the  Abbey,  they  jointly  composed  upon  them 
a  set  of  verses  in  Burns's  favourite  measure  (but  with- 
out, this  time,  any  attempt  at  his  dialect).  Unluckily 
Brown  wrote  the  lion's  share  of  the  piece  and  set  the 
tone  of  the  whole.  To  the  sixteen  stanzas  Keats  con- 
tributed, as  he  afterwards  informed  Woodhouse,  only 
the  first  line-and-a-half  of  the  first  stanza,  with  three  of 
the  later  stanzas  entire.  As  the  piece  has  never  been 
published  and  is  a  new  docimaent  in  the  history  of  the 
tour,  it  seems  to  call  for  insertion  here:  but  in  view  of 
its  length  and  lack  of  quaHty  (for  it  has  nowhere  a  touch 
of  Keats's  true  magic)  I  choose  rather  to  relegate  it  to 
an  appendix. 

It  was  on  the  eighth  or  ninth  of  August  that  the 
smack  for  London  put  out  from  Cromarty  with  Keats 
on  board,  and  Brown,  having  bidden  him  goodbye,  was 
left  to  finish  the  tour  alone — 'much  lamenting,'  says  he, 
Hhe  loss  of  his  beloved  companionship  at  my  side.' 
Keats  in  some  degree  picked  up  strength  during  a  nine 
days'  sea  passage,  the  humours  of  which  he  afterwards 
described  pleasantly  in  a  letter  to  his  brother  George. 
But  his  throat  trouble,  the  premonitory  sign  of  worse, 
never  really  or  for  any  length  of  time  left  him  afterwards. 


296  RETURN  TO  HAMPSTEAD 

On  the  18th  of  August  he  arrived  at  Hampstead,  and 
made  his  appearance  among  his  friends  the  next  day, 
'as  brown  and  as  shabby  as  you  can  imagine/  writes 
Mrs  Dilke,  'scarcely  any  shoes  left,  his  jacket  all  torn 
at  the  back,  a  fur  cap,  a  great  plaid,  and  his  knapsack. 
I  cannot  tell  what  he  looked  like.'  When  he  found 
himself  seated,  for  the  first  time  after  his  hardships,  in 
a  comfortable  stuffed  chair,  we  are  told  how  he  expressed 
a  comic  enjoyment  of  the  sensation,  quoting  at  himself 
the  words  in  which  Quince  the  carpenter  congratulates 
his  gossip  the  weaver  on  his  metamorphosis. 


CHAPTER  X 

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER   1818:    BLACKWOOD  AND  THE 
QUARTERLY 

Blackwood's  Edinburgh  Magazine — Partisan  excesses — Wild  inconsistency 
— ^Virulences  of  first  number — The  *Z'  papers  and  Leigh  Hunt — 
Blackwood  and  Walter  Scott — The  Chaldee  Manuscript — Scott's 
warning  to  Lockhart — Lockhart  and  Keats — 'Z'  on  Endymion — A 
lesson  to  critics — Marks  of  Lockhart's  hand — The  Quarterly  on  Endy- 
mion— Indignant  friends:  Bailey — Reynolds — Woodhouse  and  Taylor 
— ^Keats's  composure  under  attack — Subsequent  effects — Tom  Keats 
in  extremis — Three  months  by  the  sick-bed — First  Journal-letter  to 
America — Dread  of  love  and  marriage — Death  of  Tom  Keats. 

On  the  first  of  September,  within  a  fortnight  of  Keats's 
return  from  the  North,  appeared  the  threatened  attack 
on  him  in  Blackwood^s  Edinburgh  Magazine.  Much  as 
has  been  said  and  written  on  the  history  and  effect  of 
the  ^Cockney  SchooP  articles,  my  task  requires  that  the 
story  should  be  retold,  as  accurately  and  fairly  as  may 
be,  in  the  light  of  our  present  knowledge. 

The  Whig  party  in  politics  and  letters  had  held  full 
ascendency  for  half  a  generation  in  the  periodical  litera- 
ture of  Scotland  by  means  of  the  Edinburgh  Review, 
pubHshed  by  Archibald  Constable  and  edited  at  this 
time  by  Jeffrey.  The  Tory  rival,  the  Quarterly,  was 
owned  and  published  also  by  a  Scotsman,  but  a  Scots- 
man migrated  to  London,  John  Murray.  Early  in  1817 
William  Blackwood,  an  able  Tory  bookseller  in  Edin- 
burgh, projected  a  new  monthly  review  which  should 
be  a  thorn  in  the  side  of  his  astute  and  ambitious  trade 
rival.  Constable,  and  at  the  same  time  should  hold  up 
the  party  flag  against  the  blue  and  yellow  Whig  colours 

297 


298    BLACKWOOD'S  EDINBURGH  MAGAZINE 

in  the  North,  and  show  a  HveHer  and  lustier  fighting 
temper  than  the  Quarterly.  The  first  number  appeared 
in  March  under  the  title  of  The  Edinburgh  Monthly 
Magazine.  The  first  editors  were  two  insignificant  men 
who  proved  neither  competent  nor  loyal,  and  flat  failure 
threatening  the  enterprise,  Blackwood  after  six  months 
got  rid  of  the  editors  and  determined  to  make  a  fresh 
start.  He  added  his  own  name  to  the  title  of  the 
magazine  and  called  to  his  aid  two  brilliant  young  men 
who  had  been  occasional  contributors,  John  Wilson  and 
John  Gibson  Lockhart,  both  sound  Oxford  scholars  and 
Lockhart  moreover  a  well-read  modern  linguist,  both 
penmen  of  extraordinary  facility  and  power  of  work, 
both  at  this  period  of  their  lives  given,  in  a  spirit  partly 
of  furious  partisanship  partly  of  reckless  frolic,  to  a 
degree  of  licence  in  controversy  and  satire  inconceivable 
to-day.  Wilson,  by  birth  the  son  of  a  rich  Glasgow 
manufacturer  but  now  reduced  in  fortune,  was  in  person 
a  magnificent,  florid,  blue-eyed  athlete  of  thirty,  and  in 
literature  the  bully  and  Berserker  of  the  pair.  Lockhart, 
the  scion  of  an  ancient  Lanarkshire  house,  a  dark,  proud, 
handsome  and  graceful  youth  of  twenty-three,  pensive 
and  sardonically  reserved,  had  a  deadly  gift  of  satire 
and  caricature  and  a  lust  for  exercising  it  which  was  for 
a  time  uncontrollable  like  a  disease.  Wilson  had  lived 
on  Windermere  in  the  intimacy  of  Wordsworth  and  his 
circle,  and  already  made  a  certain  mark  in  literature 
with  his  poem  The  Isle  of  Palms.  Lockhart  had  made 
a  few  firm  friends  at  Oxford  and  after  his  degree  had 
frequented  the  Goethe  circle  at  Weimar,  but  was  other- 
wise without  social  or  literary  experience.  Blackwood 
was  the  eager  employer  and  imflinching  backer  of  both. 
The  trio  were  determined  to  push  the  magazine  into 
notoriety  by  fair  means  or  foul.  Its  management  was 
informally  divided  between  them,  so  that  no  one  person 
could  be  held  responsible.  Of  Wilson  and  Lockhart, 
each  was  at  one  time  supposed  to  be  editor,  but  neither 
ever  admitted  as  much  or  received  separate  payment 
for  editorial  work.    They  were  really  chief  contributors 


PARTISAN  EXCESSES  299 

and  trusted  and  insistent  chief  advisers,  but  Blackwood 
never  let  go  his  own  control,  and  took  upon  himself, 
now  with  effrontery,  now  with  evasion,  occasionally 
with  compromise  made  and  satisfaction  given,  all  the 
risks  and  rancours  which  the  threefold  management 
chose  to  incur. 

Wilson^s  obstreperousness,  even  when  he  had  in  some 
degree  sobered  down  as  a  university  professor,  was  at  all 
times  irresponsible  and  irrepressible,  but  for  some  of 
the  excesses  of  those  days  he  expressed  regret  and  tried 
to  make  atonement;  while  Lockhart,  the  vitriol  gradu- 
ally working  out  of  his  nature  in  the  sunshine  of  domestic 
happiness  and  of  Scott^s  genial  and  paternal  influence, 
sincerely  repented  them  when  it  was  too  late.  But  they 
lasted  long  enough  to  furnish  one  of  the  most  deplorable 
chapters  in  our  literary  history.  The  fury  of  political 
party  spirit,  infesting  the  whole  field  of  letters,  accounts 
for,  without  excusing  much.  It  was  a  rough  unscrupu- 
lous time,  the  literary  as  well  as  the  political  atmosphere 
thick,  as  we  have  seen,  with  the  mud  and  stones  of  contro- 
versy, flung  often  very  much  at  random.  The  Quarterly , 
as  conducted  by  the  acrid  and  deformed  pedant  Gifford, 
had  no  mercy  for  opponents:  and  one  of  the  harshest 
of  its  contributors  was  the  virtuous  Southey.  On  the 
other  side  the  Edinburgh,  under  the  more  urbane  and 
temperate  Jeffrey,  could  sneer  spitefully  at  all  times 
and  abuse  savagely  enough  on  occasion,  especially  when 
its  contributor  was  Hazlitt.  If  a  notorious  Edinburgh 
attack  on  Coleridge's  Christabel  volume  was  really  by 
Hazlitt,  as  Coleridge  always  believed  and  Hazlitt  never 
denied,  he  in  that  instance  added  impardonable  personal 
ingratitude  to  a  degree  of  critical  blindness  amazing  in 
such  a  man.  Even  Leigh  Hunt,  in  private  life  one  of 
the  most  amiable  of  hearts,  could  in  controversy  on  the 
liberal  side  be  almost  as  good  a  damner  (to  use  Keats's 
phrase)  as  his  ally,  the  same  Hazlitt  himself.  But 
nowhere  else  were  such  felon  strokes  dealt  in  piu-e 
wantonness  of  heart  as  in  the  early  numbers  of  Black- 
wood.   The  notorious  first  number  opened  with  an  article 


300  WILD  INCONSISTENCY 

on  Coleridge's  Biographia  Literaria  even  more  furiously 
insulting  than  the  aforesaid  Edinburgh  article  on  Christ- 
ahel  attributed  to  Hazlitt.  But  for  HazHtt  Coleridge  was 
in  politics  an  apostate  not  to  be  pardoned,  while  for  the 
Blackwood  group  he  was  no  enemy  but  an  ally.  Why 
treat  him  thus  unless  it  were  merely  for  the  purpose  of 
attracting  a  scandalized  attention?  More  amazing  even 
than  the  virulence  of  Blackwood  was  its  waywardness 
and  inconsistency.  Will  it  be  beheved  that  less  than 
three  years  later  the  same  Coleridge  was  being  praised 
and  sohcited — and  what  is  more,  successfully  solicited — 
for  contributions?  Again,  nothing  is  so  much  to  the 
credit  of  Wilson  and  Lockhart  in  those  days  as  their 
admiration  for  Wordsworth.  The  sins  of  their  first 
number  are  half  redeemed  by  the  article  in  Wordsworth's 
praise,  a  really  fine,  eloquent  piece  of  work  in  Wilson's 
boisterous  but  not  undiscriminating  manner  of  lauda- 
tion. But  not  even  Wordsworth  could  long  escape  the 
random  swash  of  Wilson's  bludgeon,  and  a  very  few 
years  later  his  friends  were  astonished  to  read  a  ferocious 
outbreak  against  him  in  one  of  the  Nodes  by  the 
same  hand.  In  regard  even  to  the  detested  Hazlitt 
the  magazine  blew  in  some  degree  hot  and  cold, 
printing  through  several  nimibers  a  series  of  respectful 
summaries,  supplied  from  London  by  Patmore,  of 
his  Surrey  Institution  lectures;  in  another  mmfiber 
a  courteous  enough  estimate  of  his  and  Jeffrey's 
comparative  powers  in  criticism;  and  a  little  later 
taking  him  to  task  on  one  page  rudely,  but  not  quite 
unjustly,  for  his  capricious  treatment  of  Shakespeare's 
minor  poems  and  on  another  page  addressing  to  him 
an  insulting  catechism  full  of  the  vilest  personal 
imputations. 

The  only  contemporary  whose  treatment  by  the 
Blackwood  trio  is  truly  consistent  was  Leigh  Hunt, 
and  of  him  it  was  consistently  blackguardly.  To 
return  to  the  first  number  of  the  new  series,  three  articles 
were  counted  on  to  create  an  uproar.  First,  the  afore- 
said emptying  of  the  critical   slop-pail  on   Coleridge. 


VIRULENCES  OF  FIRST  NUMBER       301 

Second,  the  Translation  from  an  ancient  Chaldee 
Manuscript,  being  a  biting  personal  satire,  in  language 
parodied  from  the  Bible,  on  noted  Edinburgh  characters, 
including  the  Blackwood  group  themselves,  disguised 
under  transparent  nicknames  that  stuck,  Blackwood  as 
Ebony,  Wilson  as  the  Leopard,  Lockhart  as  the  Scorpion 
that  delighteth  to  sting  the  faces  of  men.  Third,  the 
article  on  the  Cockney  School  of  Poetry,  numbered  as 
the  first  of  the  series,  headed  with  a  quotation  from 
Cornelius  Webb,  and  signed  with  the  initial  'Z.'  As  a 
thing  to  hang  gibes  on,  the  quotation  from  the  unlucky 
Webb  is  aptly  enough  chosen: — 

Our  talk  shall  be  (a  theme  we  never  tire  on) 

Of  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Shakespeare,  Milton,  Byron, 

(Our  England's  Dante) — Wordsworth,  Hunt,  and  Keats, 

The  Muses'  son  of  promise,  and  what  feats 

He  yet  may  do — 

Nor  are  the  gibes  themselves  quite  unjustified  so  far  as 
they  touch  merely  the  underbred  insipidities  of  Leigh 
Himt's  tea-party  manner  in  Rimini,  But  they  are  as 
outrageously  absurd  as  they  are  gross  and  libellous 
when  they  go  on  to  assail  both  poem  and  author  on  the 
score  of  immorality. 

The  extreme  moral  depravity  of  the  Cockney  School  is  another 
thing  which  is  for  ever  thrusting  itself  upon  the  public  attention, 
and  convincing  every  man  of  sense  who  looks  into  their  pro- 
ductions, that  they  who  sport  such  sentiments  can  never  be 
great  poets.  How  could  any  man  of  high  original  genius  ever 
stoop  publicly,  at  the  present  day,  to  dip  his  fingers  in  the  least 
of  those  glittering  and  rancid  obscenities  which  float  on  the 
surface  of  Mr  Hunt's  Hippocrene?  His  poetry  is  that  of  a  man 
who  has  kept  company  with  kept-mistresses.  He  talks  indeli- 
cately like  a  tea-sipping  milliner  girl.  Some  excuse  for  him 
there  might  have  been,  had  he  been  hurried  away  by  imagination 
or  passion.  But  with  him  indecency  is  a  disease,  as  he  speaks 
unclean  things  from  perfect  inanition.  The  very  concubine  of 
so  impure  a  wretch  as  Leigh  Hunt  would  be  to  be  pitied,  but  alas ! 
for  the  wife  of  such  a  husband!  For  him  there  is  no  charm  in 
simple  seduction;  and  he  gloats  over  it  only  when  accompanied 
with  adultery  and  incest. 


302      THE  'Z'  PAPERS  AND  LEIGH  HUNT 

Such  is  the  manner  in  which  these  censors  set  about 
showing  their  superior  breeding  and  scholarship.  ^Z' 
was  in  most  cases  probably  a  composite  and  not  a  single 
personality,  but  the  respective  shares  of  Wilson  and 
Lockhart  can  often  be  confidently  enough  disentangled 
by  those  who  know  their  styles. 

The  scandal  created  by  the  first  number  exceeded 
what  its  authors  had  hoped  or  expected.  All  Edinburgh 
was  in  a  turmoil  about  the  Chaldee  Manuscript,  the 
victims  writhing,  their  enemies  chuckling,  law-suits 
threatening  right  and  left.  In  London  the  commotion 
was  scarcely  less.  The  London  agents  for  the  sale  of 
the  Magazine  protested  strongly,  and  Blackwood  had  to 
use  some  hard  lying  in  order  to  pacify  them.  Murray, 
who  had  a  share  in  the  Magazine,  soon  began  remon- 
strating against  its  scurrilities,  and  on  their  continuance 
withdrew  his  capital.  Leigh  Hunt  in  the  Examiner 
retorted  upon  ^Z'  with  natural  indignation  and  a 
peremptory  demand  for  the  disclosure  of  his  name. 
The  libellers  hugged  their  anonymity,  and  at  first  showed 
some  slight  movement  of  panic.  In  a  second  edition 
of  the  first  number  the  Chaldee  Manuscript  was  omitted 
and  the  assault  on  Hunt  made  a  little  less  gross  and 
personal.  For  a  while  Hunt  vigorously  threatened  legal 
proceedings,  but  after  some  time  desisted,  whether 
from  lack  of  funds  or  doubt  of  a  verdict  or  inability  to 
identify  his  assailant  we  do  not  know,  and  declared, 
and  stuck  to  the  declaration,  that  he  would  take  no 
farther  notice.  The  attacks  were  soon  renewed  more 
savagely  than  ever.  The  second  of  the  'Z^  papei-s 
alone  is  scholarly  and  relatively  reasonable.  Its  phrase, 
'the  genteel  comedy  of  incest,'  fitly  enough  labels 
Rimini  in  contrast  with  the  tragic  treatment  of  kindred 
themes  by  real  masters,  as  Sophocles,  Dante,  Ford, 
Alfieri,  Schiller,  even  Byron  in  Manfred  and  Parisina. 
The  third  article,  and  two  other  attacks  in  the  form  of 
letters  addressed  directly  to  Hunt  with  the  same  signa- 
ture, are  merely  rabid  and  outrageous.  Correspondents 
having  urged  in  protest  that  Hunt's  domestic  life  was 


BLACKWOOD  AND  WALTER  SCOTT      303 

blameless,  the  assailant  says  in  effect,  so  much  the 
greater  his  offence  for  writing  a  profligate  and  demor- 
alizing poem;  and  to  this  preposterous  charge  against 
one  of  the  mildest  pieces  of  milk-and-water  sentimentahty 
in  all  literature  he  returns  (or  they  return)  with  furious 
iteration. 

The  reasons  for  this  special  savagery  against  Hunt 
have  never  been  made  fully  clear.  He  and  his 
circle  used  to  think  it  was  partly  due  to  his  slighting 
treatment  of  Scott  in  the  Feast  of  the  Poets:  nay,  they 
even  idly  imagined  for  a  moment  that  Scott  himself  had 
been  the  writer, — Scott,  than  whom  no  man  was  ever 
more  magnanimously  and  humorously  indifferent  to 
harsh  criticism  or  less  capable  of  lifting  a  finger  to  resent 
it.  But  some  of  Scott's  friends  and  idolaters  in  Edin- 
burgh were  sensitive  on  his  behalf  as  he  never  was  on 
his  own.  Even  for  the  Blackwood  assault  on  Coleridge 
one  rumoured  reason  was  that  Coleridge  had  rudely 
denounced  a  play,  the  Bertram  of  Maturin,  admired  and 
recommended  to  Drury  Lane  by  Scott;  and  it  is,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  conceivable  that  a  similar  excess  of 
loyalty  may  have  had  something  to  do  with  the  rancour 
of  the  'Z'  articles. 

Looking  back  on  the  way  in  which  the  ng,me  of  this 
great  man  got  mixed  up  in  some  minds  with  matters  so 
far  beneath  him,  it  seems  worth  while  to  set  forth 
exactly  what  were  his  relations  at  this  time  to  Black- 
wood and  the  Blackwood  group.  About  1816-1817  the 
two  rival  publishers,  Blackwood  and  Constable,  were 
hot  competitors  for  Scott^s  favour,  and  Constable  had 
lately  scored  a  point  in  the  game  in  the  matter  of  the 
Tales  of  my  Landlord.  It  became  in  the  eyes  of  Black- 
wood and  his  associates  a  vital  matter  to  secure  some 
kind  of  countenance  from  Scott  for  their  new  venture. 
They  knew  they  would  never  attach  him  as  a  partisan 
or  secure  a  monopoly  of  his  favours,  and  the  authors  of 
the  Chaldee  Manuscript  divined  his  attitude  wittily  and 
shrewdly  when  they  represented  him  as  giving  precisely 
the  same  answer  to  each  of  the  two  publishers  who 


304  THE  CHALDEE  MANUSCRIPT 

courted  him,  thus.  (The  man  in  plain  apparel  is  Black- 
wood and  the  Jordan  is  the  Tweed) : — 

44.  Then  spake  the  man  clothed  in  plain  apparel  to  the  great 
magician  who  dwelleth  in  the  old  fastness,  hard  by  the  river 
Jordan,  which  is  by  the  Border.  And  the  magician  opened  his 
mouth,  and  said,  Lo!  my  heart  wisheth  thy  good,  and  let  the 
thing  prosper  which  is  in  thy  hands  to  do  it. 

45.  But  thou  seest  that  my  hands  are  full  of  working  and  my 
labour  is  great.  For  lo  I  have  to  feed  all  the  people  of  my  land, 
and  none  knoweth  whence  his  food  cometh,  but  each  man  openeth 
his  mouth,  and  my  hand  filleth  it  with  pleasant  things. 

46.  Moreover,  thine  adversary  also  is  of  my  familiars. 

47.  The  land  is  before  thee,  draw  thou  up  thy  hosts  for  the 
battle  in  the  place  of  Princes,  over  against  thine  adversary, 
which  hath  his  station  near  the  mount  of  the  Proclamation; 
quit  ye  as  men,  and  let  favour  be  shewn  unto  him  which  is  most 
valiant. 

48.  Yet  be  thou  silent,  peradventure  will  I  help  thee  some 
little. 

More  shrewdly  still,  Blackwood  bethought  himself  of  the 
one  and  only  way  of  practically  enlisting  Scott,  and  that 
was  by  promising  permanent  work  on  the  magazine  for 
his  friend,  tenant,  and  dependent,  William  Laidlaw, 
whom  he  could  never  do  enough  to  help.  So  it  was 
arranged  that  Laidlaw  should  regularly  contribute  a 
chronicle  on  agricultural  and  antiquarian  topics,  and 
that  Scott  should  touch  it  up  and  perhaps  occasionally 
add  a  paragraph  or  short  article  of  his  own.  In  point  of 
fact  the  peccant  first  number  contains  such  an  article, 
an  entertaining  enough  little  skit  ^On  the  alarming 
Increase  of  Depravity  among  Animals.'  After  the  num- 
ber had  appeared  Scott  wrote  to  Blackwood  in  tempered 
approval,  but  saying  that  he  must  withdraw  his  support 
if  satire  like  that  of  the  Chaldee  Manuscript  was  to 
continue.  He  had  been  pleased  and  tickled  with  the 
prophetic  picture  of  his  own  neutrality,  but  strongly 
disapproved  the  sting  and  malice  of  much  of  the  rest. 

One  cannot  but  wish  he  had  put  his  foot  down  in  like 
manner  about  the  *  Cockney  School'  and  other  excesses: 
but  home — that  is  Edinburgh — affairs  and  personages 


SCOTT^S   WARNING  TO   LOCKHART      305 

interested  him  much  more  than  those  of  London.  Lock- 
hart  he  did  not  yet  personally  know.  They  first  met 
eight  months  later,  in  June  1818:  the  acquaintance 
ripened  rapidly  into  firm  devotion  on  Lockhart's  part 
— ^for  this  young  satirist  could  love  as  staunchly  as  he 
could  stab  immercifuUy — a  devotion  requited  with  an 
answering  warmth  of  affection  on  the  part  of  Scott. 
At  an  early  stage  of  their  relations  Scott,  recognizing 
with  regret  that  his  young  friend  was  'as  mischievous 
as  a  monkey/  got  an  offer  for  him  of  official  work  which 
would  have  freed  him  of  his  ties  to  Blackwood.  In 
like  manner  two  years  later  Scott  threw  himself  heart 
and  soul  into  the  contest  on  behalf  of  Wilson  for  the 
Edinburgh  chair  of  moral  philosophy,  not  merely  as  the 
Tory  candidate,  but  in  the  hope — ^never  fully  realised — 
that  the  office  would  tame  his  combative  extravagances 
as  well  as  give  scope  for  his  serious  talents.  And  when 
the  battle  was  won  and  Lockhart,  now  Scott^s  son-in- 
law,  crowed  over  it  in  a  set  of  verses  which  Scott  thought 
too  vindictive,  he  remonstrated  in  a  strain  of  admirable 
grave  and  affectionate  wisdom: — 

I  have  hitherto  avoided  saying  anything  on  this  subject, 
though  some  little  turn  towards  personal  satire  is,  I  think,- the 
only  drawback  to  your  great  and  powerful  talents,  and  I  think 
I  may  have  hinted  as  much  to  you.  But  I  wished  to  see  how  this 
matter  of  Wilson^s  would  turn,  before  making  a  clean  breast 
upon  this  subject.  .  .  .  Now  that  he  has  triumphed  I  think  it 
would  be  bad  taste  to  cry  out — *  Strike  up  our  drums — pursue 
the  scattered  stray.'  Besides,  the  natural  consequence  of  his 
situation  must  be  his  relinquishing  his  share  in  these  compositions 
— at  least,  he  will  injure  himself  in  the  opinion  of  many  friends, 
and  expose  himself  to  a  continuation  of  galling  and  vexatious 
disputes  to  the  embittering  of  his  life,  should  he  do  otherwise. 
In  that  case  I  really  hope  you  will  pause  before  you  undertake 
to  be  the  Boaz  of  the  Maga;  I  mean  in  the  personal  and  satirical 
department,  when  the  Jachin  has  seceded. 

Besides  all  other  objections  of  personal  enemies,  personal 
quarrels,  constant  obloquy,  and  all  uncharitableness,  such  an 
occupation  will  fritter  away  your  talents,  hurt  yoiu*  reputation 
both  as  a  lawyer  and  a  literary  man,  and  waste  away  your  time 
in  what  at  best  will  be  but  a  monthly  wonder.     What  has  been 


306  LOCKHART  AND  KEATS 

done  in  this  department  will  be  very  well  as  a  frolic  of  young 
men,  but  let  it  suflSce.  .  .  .  Remember  it  is  to  the  personal  satire 
I  object,  and  to  the  horse-play  of  your  raillery.  .  .  .  Revere 
yourself,  my  dear  boy,  and  think  you  were  born  to  do  your 
country  better  service  than  in  this  species  of  warfare.  I  make 
no  apology  (I  am  sure  you  will  require  none)  for  speaking  plainly 
what  my  anxious  affection  dictates.  ...  I  wish  you  to  have  the 
benefit  of  my  experience  without  purchasing  it;  and  be  assured, 
that  the  consciousness  of  attaining  complete  superiority  over 
your  calumniators  and  enemies  by  the  force  of  your  general 
character,  is  worth  a  dozen  of  triumphs  over  them  by  the  force 
of  wit  and  raillery. 

It  took  a  longer  time  and  harder  lessons  to  cure 
Lockhart  of  the  scorpion  habit  and  wean  him  from  the 
seductions  of  the  'Mother  of  Mischief/  as  Scott  in 
another  place  calls  Blackwood^ s  Magazine,  Meantime  he 
had  in  the  case  of  Keats  done  as  much  harm  as  he  could. 
He  had  not  the  excuse  of  entire  ignorance.  His  intimate 
friend  Christie  (afterwards  principal  in  the  John  Scott 
duel)  was  working  at  the  bar  in  London  and  wrote  to 
Lockhart  in  January  1818  that  he  had  met  Keats  and 
been  favourably  impressed  by  him.  In  reply  Lockhart 
writes:  'What  you  say  of  Keates  (sic)  is  pleasing,  and 
if  you  like  to  write  a  little  review  of  him,  in  admonition  to 
leave  his  ways,  etc.,  and  in  praise  of  his  natural  genius, 
I  shall  be  greatly  obliged  to  you.'  Later  Benjamin 
Bailey  had  the  opportunity  of  speaking  with  Lockhart 
in  Keats's  behalf.  Bailey  had  by  this  time  taken 
orders,  and  after  publishing  a  friendly  notice  of  Endy- 
mion  in  the  Oxford  Herald  for  June,  had  left  the  Uni- 
versity and  gone  to  settle  in  sl  curacy  in  Cumberland. 
In  the  course  of  the  summer  he  staid  at  Stirling,  at  the 
house  of  Bishop  Gleig;  whose  son,  afterwards  the 
well-known  writer  and  chaplain-general  to  the  forces, 
was  his  friend,  and  whose  daughter  he  soon  afterwards 
married.  Here  Bailey  met  Lockhart,  and  anxious  to 
save  Keats  from  the  sort  of  treatment  to  which  Hunt 
had  already  been  exposed,  took  the  opportunity  of 
telling  him  in  a  friendly  way  Keats's  circumstances  and 
history,  explaining  at  the  same  time  that  his  attachment 


'Z^  ON  ENDYMION  307 

to  Leigh  Hunt  was  personal  and  not  political;  pleading 
that  he  should  not  be  made  an  object  of  party  denuncia- 
tion; and  ending  with  the  request  that  at  any  rate 
what  had  been  thus  said  in  confidence  should  not  be 
used  to  his  disadvantage.  To  which  Lockhart  replied 
that  certainly  it  should  not  be  so  used  by  him.  Within 
three  weeks  the  article  appeared,  making  use  to  all 
appearance,  and  to  Bailey's  great  indignation,  of  the 
very  facts  he  had  thus  confidentially  communicated.^ 

'That  amiable  but  infatuated  bardling.  Mister  John 
Keats,'  had  received  a  certain  amount  of  attention 
from  'Z'  already,  both  in  the  quotation  from  Cor- 
nelius Webb  prefixed  to  the  Cockney  School  articles, 
and  in  allusion  to  Hunt's  pair  of  sonnets  on  the 
intercoronation  scene  which  he  had  printed  in  his 
volume,  Foliage,  since  the  'Z'  series  began.  WTien 
now  Keats's  own  turn  came,  in  the  fourth  article  of  the 
series,  his  treatment  was  almost  mild  in  comparison 
with  that  of  his  supposed  leader.  'This  young  man 
appears  to  have  received  from  nature  talents  of  an 
excellent,  perhaps  even  of  a  superior,  order — talents 
which,  devoted  to  the  purposes  of  any  useful  profession, 
must  have  rendered  him  a  respectable,  if  not  an  eminent 
citizen.'  But,  says  the  critic,  he  has  unfortunately 
fallen  a  victim  to  the  metromania  of  the  hour;  the 
wavering  apprentice  has  been  confirmed  in  his  desire 
to  quit  the  galHpots  by  his  admiration  for  'the  most 
worthless  and  affected  of  all  the  versifiers  of  our  time.' 
'Mr  Hunt  is  a  small  poet,  but  he  is  a  clever  man,  Mr 
Keats  is  a  still  smaller  poet,  and  he  is  only  a  boy  of 
pretty  abihties  which  he  has  done  everything  in  his 
power  to  spoil.'  And  so  on;  and  so  on;  not  of  course 
omitting  to  put  a  finger  on  real  weaknesses,  as  lack  of 
scholarship,  the  use  of  Cockney  rimes  like  higher ,  Thalia; 
ear,  Cytherea;  thorn,  fawn]  deriding  the  Boileau 
passage  in  Sleep  and  Poetry,  and  perceiving  nothing 
but  laxity  and  nervelessness  in  the  treatment  of  the 
metre.     Li  the  conceit  of  academic  talent  and  training, 

1  Houghton  MSS. 


308  A  LESSON  TO  CRITICS 

the  critic  shows  himself  open-eyed  to  aU  the  faults  and 
stone-blind  to  all  the  beauty  and  genius  and  promise, 
and  ends  with  a  vulgarity  of  supercilious  patronage 
beside  which  all  the  silly  venial  faults  of  taste  in  Leigh 
Himt  seem  like  good  breeding  itself. 

And  now,  good-morrow  to  *the  Muses'  son  of  Promise;'  as 
for  *the  feats  he  yet  may  do/  as  we  do  not  pretend  to  say  like 
himself,  *Muse  of  my  native  land  am  I  inspired,'  we  shall  adhere 
to  the  safe  old  rule  of  pauca  verba.  We  venture  to  make  one 
small  prophecy,  that  his  bookseller  will  not  a  second  time  venture 
£50  upon  any  thing  he  can  write.  It  is  a  better  and  a  wiser 
thing  to  be  a  starved  apothecary  than  a  starved  poet;  so  back 
to  the  shop  Mr  John,  back  to  *  plasters,  pills,  and  ointment 
boxes,'  etc.  But,  for  Heaven's  sake,  young  Sangrado,  be  a  little 
more  sparing  of  extenuatives  and  soporifics  in  your  practice  than 
you  have  been  in  your  poetry. 

There  is  a  lesson  in  these  things.  I  remember  the 
late  Mr  Andrew  Lang,  one  of  the  most  variously  gifted 
and  richly  equipped  critical  minds  of  our  time,  and 
under  a  surface  vein  of  flippancy  essentially  kind- 
hearted, — I  remember  Mr  Andrew  Lang,  in  a  candid 
mood  of  conversation,  wondering  whether  in  like  cir- 
cumstances he  might  not  have  himself  committed  a  like 
offence,  and  with  no  Hyperion  or  St  Agnes'  Eve  or  Odes 
yet  written  and  only  the  1817  volume  and  Endymion 
before  him,  have  dismissed  Keats  fastidiously  and 
scoffingly.  Who  knows? — and  let  us  all  take  warning. 
But  now-a-days  the  errors  of  criticism  are  perhaps 
rather  of  an  opposite  kind,  and  any  rashness  and 
rawness  of  undisciplined  novelty  is  apt  to  find  itself  in- 
dulged and  fostered  rather  than  repressed.  What  should 
at  any  time  have  saved  Endymion  from  harsh  judgment, 
if  the  quality  of  the  poetry  could  not  save  it,  was  the 
quahty  of  the  preface.  How  could  either  carelessness 
or  rancour  not  recognize,  not  augur  the  best  from,  its 
fine  spirit  of  manliness  and  modesty  and  self-knowledge  ? 

The  responsibility  for  the  gallipots  article,  as  for  so 
many  others  in  the  Blackwood  of  the  time,  may  have 
been  in  some  sort  collective.  But  that  Lockhart  had 
the  chief  share  in  it  is  certain.    According  to  Dilke,  he 


MARKS  OF  LOCKHART'S  HAND         309 

in  later  life  owned  as  much.  To  those  who  know  his 
hand,  he  stands  confessed  not  only  in  the  general  gist 
and  style  but  in  particular  phrases.  One  is  the  use  of 
Sangrado  for  doctor,  a  use  which  both  Scott  and  Lock- 
hart  had  caught  from  Gil  Bias}  Others  are  the  allusions 
to  the  Metromanie  of  Piron  and  the  Endymion  of 
Wieland;  particularly  the  latter.  Wieland^s  Oheron,  as 
we  have  seen,  had  made  its  mark  in  England  through 
Sotheby^s  translation,  but  no  other  member  of  the 
Blackwood  group  is  the  least  likely  to  have  had  any 
acquaintance  with  his  imtranslated  minor  works  except 
Lockhart,  whose  stay  at  Weimar  had  given  him  a  familiar 
knowledge  of  contemporary  German  literature.  In  the 
Mad  Banker  of  Amsterdam,  a  comic  poem  in  the  vein  of 
Frere's  Whistlecraft  and  Byron's  Beppo,  contributed  by 
him  at  this  time  to  Blackwood  imder  one  of  his 
Protean  pseudonyms,  as  ^William  Wastle  Esq.,'  Lockhart 
sketches  his  own  likeness  as  follows: — 

Then  touched  I  off  friend  Lockhart  (Gibson  John), 
So  fond  of  jabbering  about  Tieck  and  Schlegel, 

Klopstock  and  Wieland,  Kant  and  Mendelssohn, 

All  High  Dutch  quacks,  like  Spurzheim  or  Feinagle — 

Him  the  Chaldee  yclept  the  Scorpion. — 
The  claws,  but  not  the  pinions,  of  the  eagle, 

Are  Jack's,  but  though  I  do  not  mean  to  flatter. 

Undoubtedly  he  has  strong  powers  of  satire. 

Bailey  to  the  end  of  his  life  never  forgave  Lockhart 
for  what  he  held  to  be  a  base  breach  of  faith  after  their 
conversation  above  mentioned,  and  his  indignation  com- 
municated itself  to  the  Keats  circle  and  afterwards,  as 
we  shall  see,  to  Keats  himself.  Mr  Andrew  Lang,  in 
his  excellent  Life  of  Lockhart,  making  such  defence  as 
is  candidly  possible  for  his  hero's  share  in  the  Blackwood 
scandals,  urges  justly  enough  that  the  only  matter  of 
fact  divulged  about  Keats  by  'Z'  is  that  of  his  having 
been  apprenticed  to  a  surgeon  (^Z'  prefers  to  say  an 
apothecary)   and  that  thus  much  Lockhart  could  not 

^  The  source  is  the  Spanish  sangrador,  blood-letter;   which  Le  Sage  in 
Gil  Bias  converts  into  a  proper  name,  Sangrado. 


310   THE  QUARTERLY   ON  ENDYMION 

well  help  knowing  independently,  either  from  his  own 
friend  Christie  or  from  Bailey's  friend  and  future 
brother-in-law  Gleig,  then  living  at  Edinburgh  and 
about  to  become  one  of  Blackwood^s  chief  supporters. 
When  in  farther  defence  of  *Z's'  attacks  on  Hunt 
Mr  Lang  quotes  from  Keats's  letters  phrases  in  dis- 
praise of  Hunt  almost  as  strong  as  those  used  by  ^Z' 
himself,  he  forgets  the  world  of  difference  there  is 
between  the  confidential  criticism,  in  a  passing  mood 
or  whim  of  impatience,  of  a  friend  by  a  friend  to  a  friend 
and  the  gross  and  reiterated  public  defamation  of  a 
political  and  literary  opponent. 

Lockhart  in  after  life  pleaded  the  rawness  of  youth, 
and  also  that  in  the  random  and  incoherent  violences  of 
the  early  years  of  Blackwood  there  had  been  less  of 
real  and  settled  malice  than  in  the  Quarterly  Review  as 
at  that  time  conducted.  The  plea  may  be  partly  ad- 
mitted, but  to  forgive  him  we  need  all  the  gratitude 
which  is  his  due  for  his  filial  devotion  to  and  immortal 
biography  of  Scott,  as  well  as  all  the  allowance  to  be 
made  for  a  dangerous  gift  and  bias  of  nature. 

The  Quarterly  article  on  Endymion  followed  in  the 
last  week  of  September  (in  the  number  dated  April, — 
such  in  those  days  was  editorial  punctuality).  It  is 
now  known  to  have  been  the  work  of  John  Wilson 
Croker,  a  man  of  many  sterling  gifts  and  honourable 
loyalties,  unjustly  blackened  in  the  eyes  of  posterity  by 
Macaulay's  rancorous  dislike  and  DisraeH's  masterly 
caricature,  but  in  literature  as  in  politics  the  narrowest 
and  stiffest  of  conservative  partisans.  Like  his  editor 
Gifford,  he  was  trained  in  strict  allegiance  to  eighteenth- 
century  tradition  and  the  school  of  Pope.  His  brief 
review  of  Endymion  is  that  of  a  man  insensible  to  the 
higher  charm  of  poetry,  incapable  of  judging  it  except 
by  mechanical  rule  and  precedent,  and  careless  of  the 
pain  he  gives.  He  professes  to  have  been  unable  to 
read  beyond  the  first  canto,  or  to  make  head  or  tail  of 
that,  and  what  is  worse,  turns  the  frank  avowals  of 
Keats's  preface  foolishly  and  unfairly  against  him.    At 


INDIGNANT  FRIENDS:    BAILEY         311 

the  same  time,  like  Lockhart,  he  does  not  fail  to  point 
out  and  exaggerate  real  weaknesses  of  Keats's  early 
manner,  and  the  following,  from  the  point  of  view  of  a 
critic  who  sees  no  salvation  outside  the  closed  couplet, 
is  not  unreasonable  criticism: — 

He  seems  to  us  to  write  a  line  at  random,  and  then  he  follows 
not  the  thought  excited  by  this  line,  but  that  suggested  by  the 
rhyme  with  which  it  concludes.  There  is  hardly  a  complete 
couplet  inclosing  a  complete  idea  in  the  whole  book.  He  wanders 
from  one  subject  to  another,  from  the  association,  not  of  ideas 
but  of  sounds,  and  the  work  is  composed  of  hemistichs  which, 
it  is  quite  evident,  have  forced  themselves  upon  the  author  by 
the  mere  force  of  the  catchwords  on  which  they  turn. 

In  another  of  the  established  reviews,  The  British 
Critic,  a  third  censor  came  out  with  a  notice  even  more 
contemptuous  than  those  of  Blackwood  and  the  Qtcar- 
terly.  For  a  moment  Keats's  pride  winced,  as  any 
man's  might,  under  the  personal  insults  of  the  critics, 
and  dining  in  the  company  of  HazHtt  and  Woodhouse 
with  Mr  Hessey,  the  publisher,  he  seems  to  have  declared 
in  Woodhouse's  hearing  that  he  would  write  no  more. 
But  he  quickly  recovered  his  balance,  and  in  a  letter 
to  Dilke  of  a  few  days  later,  speaking  of  Hazlitt's  wrath 
against  the  Blackwood  scribes,  is  silent  as  to  their  treat- 
ment of  himself.  Meantime  some  of  his  friends  and 
more  than  one  stranger  were  actively  sympathetic  and 
indignant  on  his  behalf.  A  just  and  vigorous  expostu- 
lation appeared  in  the  Morning  Chronicle  under  the 
initials  J.  S., — those  in  all  likelihood  of  John  Scott, 
then  editor  of  the  London  Magazine,  not  long 
afterwards  killed  by  Lockhart's  friend  Christie  in  a 
needless  and  blundering  duel  arising  out  of  these  very 
Blackwood  brawls.  Bailey,  being  in  Edinburgh,  had  an 
interview  with  Blackwood  and  pleaded  to  be  allowed 
to  contribute  a  reply  to  his  magazine;  and  this  being 
refused,  sought  out  Constable,  who  besides  the  Edin- 
burgh Review  conducted  the  monthly  periodical  which 
had  been  kind  to  Keats's  first  volume,^  and  proposed 

^  The  old  Scots  Magazine  lately  re-started  under  a  new  name;  see 
above,  p.  132. 


312  REYNOLDS 

to  publish  in  it  an  attack  on  Blackwood  and  the  ^V 
articles:  but  Constable  would  not  take  the  risk.  Rey- 
nolds published  in  a  west-country  paper,  the  Alfred,  a 
warm  rejoinder  to  the  Quarterly  reviewer,  containing  a 
judicious  criticism  in  brief  of  Keats's  work,  with  remarks 
very  much  to  the  point  on  the  contrast  between  his  and 
the  egotistical  (meaning  Wordsworth's)  attitude  to 
nature.  This  Leigh  Himt  reprinted  with  some  intro- 
ductory words  in  the  Examiner,  and  later  in  life 
regretted  that  he  had  not  done  more.  But  he  could 
not  have  done  more  to  any  purpose.  He  was  not 
himself  an  enthusiastic  admirer  of  Endymion,  had 
plainly  said  so  to  Keats  and  to  his  friends,  and  would 
have  got  out  of  his  depth  if  he  had  tried  to  appre- 
ciate the  intensity  and  complexity  of  symbolic  and 
spiritual  meaning  which  made  that  poem  so  different 
from  his  own  shallow,  self-pleasing  metrical  versions  of 
classic  or.  Italian  tales.  Reynolds's  piece,  which  he 
re-printed,  was  quite  effective  and  to  the  point  as  far 
as  it  went;  and  moreover  any  formal  defence  of  Keats 
by  Himt  would  only  have  increased  the  virulence  of  his 
enemies,  as  they  both  perfectly  well  knew.  Privately  at 
the  same  time  Reynolds,  who  had  just  been  reading 
The  Pot  of  Basil  in  manuscript,  wrote  to  his  friend  with 
affectionate  wisdom  as  follows: — 

As  to  the  poem,  I  am  of  all  things  anxious  that  you  should 
publish  it,  for  its  completeness  will  be  a  full  answer  to  all  the 
ignorant  malevolence  of  cold,  lying  Scotchmen  and  stupid 
Englishmen.  The  overweening  struggle  to  oppress  you  only 
shows  the  world  that  so  much  of  endeavour  cannot  be  directed 
to  nothing.  Men  do  not  set  their  muscles  and  strain  their  sinews 
to  break  a  straw.  I  am  confident,  Keats,  that  the  *Pot  of  Basil' 
hath  that  simplicity  and  quiet  pathos  which  are  of  a  sure  sover- 
eignty over  all  hearts.  I  must  say  that  it  would  delight  me  to 
have  you  prove  yourself  to  the  world  what  we  know  you  to  be — 
to  have  you  annul  The  Quarterly  Review  by  the  best  of  all  answers. 
One  or  two  of  your  sonnets  you  might  print,  I  am  sure.  And  I 
know  that  I  may  suggest  to  you  which,  because  you  can  decide 
as  you  like  afterward.  You  will  remember  that  we  were  to 
print  together.  I  give  over  all  intention,  and  you  ought  to  be 
alone.     I  can  never  write  anything  now — my  mind  is  taken  the 


WOODHOUSE  AND  TAYLOR  313 

other  way.  But  I  shall  set  my  heart  on  having  you  high,  as 
you  ought  to  be.  Do  you  get  Fame,  and  I  shall  have  it  in  being 
your  affectionate  and  steady  friend. 

Woodhouse,  in  a  correspondence  with  the  unceasingly 
kind  and  loyal  publishers  Taylor  and  Hessey,  shows 
himself  as  deeply  moved  as  anyone,  and  Taylor  in  the 
course  of  the  autimm  sought  to  enlist  on  behaK  of  the 
victim  the  private  sjnmpathies  of  one  of  the  most  culti- 
vated and  influential  Liberal  thinkers  and  publicists  of 
the  time,  Sir  James  Mackintosh.  Sending  him  a  copy 
of  Endymion,  Taylor  writes: — ^Its  faults  are  numberless, 
but  there  are  redeeming  features  in  my  opinion,  and  the 
faults  are  those  of  real  Genius.  Whatever  this  work  is, 
its  Author  is  a  true  poet.'  After  a  few  words  as  to 
Keats's  family  and  circumstances  he  adds,  'These  are 
odd  particulars  to  give,  when  I  am  introducing  the  work 
and  not  the  man  to  you, — ^but  if  you  knew  him,  you 
would  also  feel  that  strange  personal  interest  in  all  that 
concerns  him. — Mr  Gifford  forgot  his  own  early  hfe 
when  he  tried  to  bear  down  this  yoimg  man.  Happily, 
it  will  not  succeed.  If  he  lives,  Keats  will  be  the 
brightest  ornament  of  this  Age.'  In  concluding  Taylor 
recommends  particularly  to  his  correspondent's  atten- 
tion the  hymn  to  Pan,  the  Glaucus  episode,  and  above 
all  the  triumph  of  Bacchus. 

Proud  in  the  extreme,  Keats  had  no  irritable  vanity; 
and  aiming  in  his  art,  if  not  always  steadily,  yet  always 
at  the  highest,  he  rather  despised  than  courted  such 
successes  as  he  saw  some  of  his  contemporaries — ^Thomas 
Moore,  for  instance,  with  Lalla  Rookh — enjoy.  'I  hate,' 
he  says,  'a  mawkish  popularity.'  Wise  recognition  and 
encouragement  would  no  doubt  have  helped  and  cheered 
him,  but  even  in  the  hopes  of  permanent  fame  which  he 
avowedly  cherished,  there  was  nothing  intemperate  or 
impatient;  and  he  was  conscious  of  perceiving  his  own 
shortcomings  at  least  as  clearly  as  his  critics.  Accord- 
ingly he  took  his  treatment  at  their  hands  more  coolly 
than  older  and  more  experienced  men  had  taken  the 
like.    Hunt,  as  we  have  seen,  had  replied  indignantly 


314   KEATS'S  COMPOSURE  UNDER  ATTACK 

to  his  Blackwood  traducers,  repelling  scorn  with  scorn, 
and  he  and  Hazlitt  were  both  at  first  red-hot  to  have 
the  law  of  them.  Keats  after  the  first  sting  with  great 
dignity  and  simplicity  treated  the  annoyance  as  one 
merely  temporary,  indifTerent,  and  external.  When 
early  in  October  Mr  Hessey  sent  for  his  encouragement 
the  extracts  from  the  papers  in  which  he  had  been 
defended,  he  wrote: — 

I  cannot  but  feel  indebted  to  those  gentlemen  who  have  taken 
my  part.  As  for  the  rest,  I  begin  to  get  a  little  acquainted  with 
my  own  strength  and  weakness.  Praise  or  blame  has  but  a 
momentary  effect  on  the  man  whose  love  of  beauty  in  the  abstract 
makes  him  a  severe  critic  on  his  own  works.  My  own  domestic 
criticism  has  given  me  pain  without  comparison  beyond  what 
'Blackwood'  or  the  *  Quarterly'  could  possibly  inflict — and  also 
when  I  feel  I  am  right,  no  external  praise  can  give  me  such  a  glow 
as  my  own  solitary  re-perception  and  ratification  of  what  is  fine. 
J.  S.  is  perfectly  right  in  regard  to  the  slip-shod  Endymion. 
That  it  is  so  is  no  fault  of  mine.  No ! — though  it  may  sound  a 
little  paradoxical.  It  is  as  good  as  I  had  power  to  make  it — by 
myself.  Had  I  been  nervous  about  its  being  a  perfect  piece, 
and  with  that  view  asked  advice,  and  trembled  over  every  page, 
it  would  not  have  been  written;  for  it  is  not  in  my  nature  to 
fumble — I  will  write  independently. — I  have  written  indepen- 
dently without  Judgment.  I  may  write  independently,  and  with 
Judgment^  hereafter,  ^he  Genius  of  Poetry  must  work  out  its 
own  salvation  in  a  man:  It  cannot  be  matured  by  law  and 
precept,  but  by  sensation  and  watchfulness  in  itself.  That  which 
is  creative  must  create  itself.  In  Endymion  I  leaped  headlong 
into  the  sea,  and  thereby  have  become  better  acquainted  with 
the  Soundings,  the  quicksands,  and  the  rocks,  than  if  I  had 
stayed  upon  the  green  shore,  and  piped  a  silly  pipe,  and  took 
tea  and  comfortable  advice.  I  was  never  afraid  of  failure;  for 
I  would  sooner  fail  than  not  be  among  the  greatest.  But  I  am 
nigh  getting  into  a  rant. 

Two  or  three  weeks  later,  in  answer  to  a  similar 
encouraging  letter  from  Woodhouse,  he  explains,  in 
sentences  luminous  with  self-knowledge,  what  he  calls 
his  own  chameleon  character  as  a  poet,  and  the  variable 
and  impressionable  temperament  such  a  character 
implies.  'Where  then,'  he  adds,  'is  the  wonder  that 
I  should  say  I  would  write  no  more?    Might  I  not  at 


SUBSEQUENT  EFFECTS  315 

that  very  instant  have  been  cogitating  on  the  characters 
of  Saturn  and  Ops?  ...  I  know  not  whether  I  make 
myself  wholly  understood:  I  hope  enough  to  make  you 
see  that  no  dependence  is  to  be  placed  on  what  I  said 
that  day.'  And  again  about  the  same  time  to  his  brother 
and  sister-in-law: — 

There  have  been  two  letters  in  my  defence  in  the  *  Chronicle/  and 
one  in  the  'Examiner/  copied  from  the  Exeter  paper,  and  written 
by  Reynolds.  I  don't  know  who  wrote  those  in  the  'Chronicle.' 
This  is  a  mere  matter  of  the  moment:  I  think  I  shall  be  among 
the  English  Poets  after  my  death.  Even  as  a  matter  of  present 
interest,  the  attempt  to  crush  me  in  the  'Quarterly'  has  only 
brought  me  more  into  notice,  and  it  is  a  common  expression 
among  bookmen,  'I  wonder  the  "Quarterly"  should  cut  its  own 
throat.' 

It  does  me  not  the  least  harm  in  Society  to  make  me  appear 
little  and  ridiculous:  I  know  when  a  man  is  superior  to  me  and 
give  him  all  due  respect — he  will  be  the  last  to  laugh  at  me  and 
as  for  the  rest  I  feel  that  I  make  an  impression  upon  them  which 
ensures  me  personal  respect  while  I  am  in  sight  whatever  they 
may  say  when  my  back  is  turned.  s 

Since  these  firm  expressions  of  indifference  to  critical 
attack  have  been  before  the  worlds  it  has  been  too  con- 
fidently assumed  that  Shelley  and  Byron  were  totally 
misled  and  wide  of  the  mark  when  they  believed  that 
Blackwood  and  the  Quarterly  had  killed  Keats  or  even 
much  hurt  him.  But  the  truth  is  that  not  they,  but 
their  consequences,  did  in  their  degree  help  to  kill  him. 
It  must  not  be  supposed  that  such  words  of  wisdom  and 
composure,  manifestly  sincere  as  they  are,  represent  the 
whole  of  Keats,  or  anything  like  the  whole.  They 
represent,  indeed,  the  admirably  sound  and  manly 
elements  which  were  a  part  of  him:  they  show  us  the 
veins  of  what  Matthew  Arnold  calls  flint  and  iron  in 
his  nature  uppermost.  But  he  was  no  Wordsworth,  to 
remain  all  flint  and  iron  in  indifference  to  derision  and 
in  the  scorn  of  scorn.  He  had  not  only  in  a  tenfold 
degree  the  ordinary  acuteness  of  a  poet's  feelings:  he 
had  the  variable  and  chameleon  temperament  of  which 
he  warns  Woodhouse  while  in  the  very  act  of  re-assuring 


316  TOM  KEATS  IN  EXTREMIS 

him:  he  had  along  with  the  flint  and  iron  a  strong 
congenital  tendency,  against  which  he  was  always 
fighting  but  not  always  successfully,  to  fits  of  depression 
and  self-torment.  Moreover  the  reviews  of  those  days, 
especially  the  Edinburgh  and  Quarterly,  had  a  real 
power  of  barring  the  acceptance  and  checking  the  sale 
of  an  author's  work.  What  actually  happened  was  that 
when  a  year  or  so  later  Keats  began  to  realise  the  harm 
which  the  reviews  had  done  and  were  doing  to  his 
material  prospects,  these  consequences  in  his  darker 
hours  preyed  on  him  severely  and  conspired  with  the 
forces  of  disease  and  passion  to  his  undoing. 

For  the  present  and  during  the  first  stress  of  the 
Blackwood  and  Quarterly  storms,  he  was  really  living 
under  the  pressure  of  another  and  far  more  heartfelt 
trouble.  His  friends  the  Dilkes,  before  they  heard  of 
his  intended  return  from  Scotland,  had  felt  reluctantly 
bound  to  write  and  summon  him  home  on  account  of 
the  alarming  condition  of  his  brother  Tom,  whom  he 
had  left  behind  in  their  lodgings  at  Well  Walk.  In  fact 
the  case  was  desperate,  and  for  the  next  three  months 
Keats's  chief  occupation  was  the  harrowing  one  of  watch- 
ing and  ministering  to  this  dying  brother.  In  a  letter 
written  to  Dilke  in  the  third  week  of  September,  he  speaks 
thus  of  his  feelings  and  occupations: — 

I  wish  I  could  say  Tom  was  better.  His  identity  presses  upon 
me  so  all  day  that  I  am  obliged  to  go  out — and  although  I  had 
intended  to  have  given  some  time  to  study  alone,  I  am  obliged 
to  write  and  plunge  into  abstract  images  to  ease  myself  of  his 
countenance,  his  voice,  and  feebleness — so  that  I  live  now  in  a 
continual  fever.  It  must  be  poisonous  to  life,  although  I  feel 
well.  Imagine  'the  hateful  siege  of  contraries' — if  I  think  of 
fame,  of  poetry,  it  seems  a  crime  to  me,  and  yet  I  must  do  so 
or  suffer. 

And  again  about  the  same  time  to  Reynolds: — 

I  never  was  in  love,  yet  the  voice  and  shape  of  a  Woman  has 
haunted  me  these  two  days — at  such  a  time  when  the  relief, 
the  feverish  relief  of  poetry,  seems  a  much  less  crime.  This 
morning  poetry  has  conquered — I  have  relapsed  into  those 
abstractions  which  are  my  only  life — I  feel  escaped  from  a  new, 


THREE  MONTHS  BY  THE  SICK-BED    317 

strange,  and  threatening  sorrow,  and  I  am  thankful  for  it.     There 
is  an  awful  warmth  about  my  heart,  like  a  load  of  immortality. 

What  he  calls  the  abstractions  into  which  he  had 
plunged  for  relief  were  the  conceptions  of  the  fallen 
Titans,  'the  characters  of  Saturn  and  Ops'  at  the 
beginning  of  Hyperion,  Those  conceptions  were  just 
beginning  to  clothe  themselves  in  his  mind  in  the  verses 
which  every  English  reader  knows,  verses  of  a  cadence 
as  majestic  and  pathetic  almost  as  any  in  the  language, 
yet  scarcely  more  charged  with  high  emotion  or  more 
pregnant  with  the  sense  and  pressure  of  destiny  than 
some  of  the  prose  of  his  familiar  letters  written  about 
the  same  time.  His  only  other  attempt  in  poetry  during 
those  weeks  was  a  translation  from  a  sonnet  of  Ronsard, 
whose  works  Taylor  had  lent  him  and  from  whom  he 
got  some  hints  for  the  names  and  characters  of  his 
Titans.  As  the  autumn  wore  on  the  task  of  the  watcher 
grew  ever  more  sorrowful  and  absorbing,  he  was  obliged 
to  desist  from  poetry  for  the  time.  But  his  correspon- 
dence shows  no  flagging.  Towards  the  middle  of  October 
he  began,  marking  it  as  A,  the  first  of  the  series  of  journal- 
letters  to  his  brother  and  sister  in  America,  which  give 
us  during  the  next  fifteen  months  a  picture  of  his  out- 
ward and  inward  being  fuller  and  richer  than  we  possess 
from  any  other  poet,  and  except  in  one  single  particular 
absolutely  unreserved.  Despatching  the  packet  on  his 
birthday,  that  is  October  29  or  31,  he  explains  why  it 
is  not  longer  (it  is  over  7,000  words):  'Tom  is  rather 
more  easy  than  he  has  been:  but  is  still  so  nervous 
that  I  cannot  speak  to  him  of  these  Matters — ^indeed 
it  is  the  care  I  have  had  to  keep  his  mind  aloof  from 
feelings  too  acute  that  has  made  this  letter  so  short  a 
one — I  did  not  like  to  write  before  him  a  letter  he  knew 
was  to  reach  your  hands — I  cannot  even  now  ask  him 
for  any  Message — his  heart  speaks  to  you.  Be  as  happy 
as  you  can.'  Keats  had  begun  by  warning  George  and 
his  wife,  in  language  of  beautiful  tender  moderation 
and  sincerity,  to  prepare  their  minds  for  the  worst,  and 
assuring  them  of  the  comfort  he  took  in  the  thoughts  of 


318  FIRST  JOURNAL-LETTER  TO  AMERICA 

them: — 'I  have  Fanny  and  I  have  you — three  people 
whose  Happiness  to  me  is  sacred — and  it  does  annul  that 
selfish  sorrow  which  I  should  otherwise  fall  into,  living 
as  I  do  with  poor  Tom  who  looks  upon  me  as  his  only 
comfort — the  tears  will  come  into  your  Eyes — ^let  them 
— and  embrace  each  other — ^thank  heaven  for  what 
happiness  you  have,  and  after  thinking  a  moment  or 
two  that  you  suffer  in  common  with  all  Mankind  hold 
it  not  a  sin  to  regain  your  cheerfulness/  Between  the 
opening  and  the  closing  note  of  tenderness,  the  letter 
runs  through  a  wide  range  of  subject  and  feeling; 
gossip  about  the  Dilkes  and  other  acquaintances;  an 
account  of  the  humours  of  his  sea-passage  from  Inver- 
ness to  London;  the  unruffled  allusion  to  the  Tory 
reviews  from  which  we  have  already  quoted;  two  long 
and  curious  sex-haunted  passages,  one  expressing  his 
admiration  of  the  same  East  Indian  cousin  of  the  Rey- 
noldses,  ^not  a  Cleopatra,  but  at  least  a  Charmian/ 
whom  we  have  found  mentioned  already  in  a  letter  to 
Reynolds,  the  other  telling  what  promised  to  be  an 
equivocal  adventure,  but  turned  out  quite  conven- 
tionally and  politely,  with  a  mysterious  lady  acquaint- 
ance met  once  before  at  Hastings;  a  rambling  discussion 
on  the  state  of  home  and  foreign  politics;  a  rhapsody, 
or  as  he  would  have  called  it  rant,  in  a  mounting  strain 
of  verse  which  rings  like  a  boy's  voice  singing  in  alt, 
prophesying  that  the  child  to  be  born  to  George  and  his 
wife  shall  be  the  first  American  poet;  then  more  babble 
about  friends  and  acquaintances;  then,  as  if  he  knew 
that  the  invincible  thing,  the  love-god  whose  spell  he 
had  always  at  once  dreaded  and  longed  for,  were  hovering 
and  about  to  swoop,  he  tries  to  re-assure  himself  by  call- 
ing up  the  reasons  why  marriage  and  the  life  domestic  are 
not  for  him.  The  Charmian  passage  and  the  passage 
in  which  he  seeks  to  stave  off  the  approach  of  love  are 
among  the  best  known  in  his  letters,  but  nevertheless 
the  most  necessary  to  quote: — 

She  has  a  rich  eastern  look;  she  has  fine  eyes  and  fine  manners. 
When  she  comes  into  a  room  she  makes  an  impression  the  same 


DREAD  OF  LOVE  AND  MARRIAGE      319 

as  the  Beauty  of  a  Leopardess.  She  is  too  fine  and  too  conscious 
of  herself  to  repulse  any  Man  who  may  address  her — from  habit 
she  thinks  that  nothing  particular.  I  always  find  myself  more  at 
ease  with  such  a  woman;  the  picture  before  me  always  gives 
me  a  life  and  animation  which  I  cannot  possibly  feel  with  any- 
thing inferior.  I  am  at  such  times  too  much  occupied  in  admiring 
to  be  awkward  or  on  a  tremble.  I  forget  myself  entirely  because 
I  live  in  her.  You  will  by  this  time  think  I  am  in  love  with 
her;  so  before  I  go  further  I  will  tell  you  I  am  not — she  kept 
me  awake  one  Night  as  a  tune  of  Mozart's  might  do.  I  speak 
of  the  thing  as  a  pastime  and  an  amusement  than  which  I  can 
feel  none  deeper  than  a  conversation  with  an  imperial  woman 
the  very  *yes'  and  *no'  of  whose  Lips  is  to  me  a  Banquet.  I 
don't  cry  to  take  the  Moon  home  with  me  in  my  Pocket  nor  do 
I  fret  to  leave  her  behind  me.  I  like  her  and  her  like  because 
one  has  no  sensations — what  we  both  are  is  taken  for  granted. 
You  will  suppose  I  have  by  this  had  much  talk  with  her — no 
such  thing — there  are  the  Miss  Reynoldses  on  the  look  out. 
They  think  I  don't  admire  her  because  I  did  not  stare  at  her. 
They  call  her  a  flirt  to  me.  What  a  want  of  knowledge!  She 
walks  across  a  room  in  such  a  Manner  that  a  Man  is  drawn 
towards  her  with  a  magnetic  Power.  This  they  call  flirting! 
They  do  not  know  things. 

In  the  next  passage,  almost  as  the  young  priest  Ion 
in  the  Greek  play  clings  to  his  ministration  in  the  temple 
of  Apollo,  so  we  find  Keats  cleaving  exultingly  to  his 
high  vocation  and  to  the  idea  of  a  life  dedicated  to 
poetry  alone.  But  a  great  spiritual  flaw  in  his  nature 
— or  was  it  only  a  lack  of  fortunate  experience? — 
betrays  itself  in  his  conception  of  the  alternative  from 
which  he  shrinks.  The  imagery  under  which  he  figures 
marriage  joys  gives  no  hint  of  their  power  to  discipline 
and  inspire  and  sustain,  and  is  trivially  sensuous  and 
material. 

Notwithstanding  your  Happiness  and  your  recommendation 
I  hope  I  shall  never  marry.  Though  the  most  beautiful  Creature 
were  waiting  for  me  at  the  end  of  a  Journey  or  a  Walk;  though 
the  Carpet  were  of  Silk,  the  Curtains  of  the  morning  Clouds;  the 
chairs  and  Sofa  stuffed  with  Cygnet's  down;  the  food  Manna, 
the  Wine  beyond  Claret,  the  Window  opening  on  Windermere, 
I  should  not  feel — or  rather  my  Happiness  would  not  be  so  fine, 
as  my  Solitude  is  sublime.     Then  instead  of  what  I  have  described 


320  DEATH  OF  TOM  KEATS 

there  is  a  sublimity  to  welcome  me  home.  The  roaring  of  the 
wind  is  my  wife  and  the  Stars  through  the  windowpane  are  my 
Children.  The  mighty  abstract  Idea  I  have  of  Beauty  in  all 
things  stifles  the  more  divided  and  minute  domestic  happiness — 
an  amiable  wife  and  sweet  Children  I  contemplate  as  a  part  of 
that  Beauty,  but  I  must  have  a  thousand  of  those  beautiful 
particles  to  fill  up  my  heart.  I  feel  more  and  more  every  day, 
as  my  imagination  strengthens,  that  I  do  not  live  in  this  world 
alone  but  in  a  thousand  worlds.  No  sooner  am  I  alone  than 
shapes  of  epic  greatness  are  stationed  around  me,  and  serve  my 
Spirit  the  office  which  is  equivalent  to  a  King's  body-guard — 
then  'Tragedy  with  sceptered  pall  comes  sweeping  by.'  According 
to  my  state  of  mind  I  am  with  Achilles  shouting  in  the  Trenches, 
or  with  Theocritus  in  the  Vales  of  Sicily.  Or  I  throw  my  whole 
being  into  Troilus,  and  repeating  those  lines,  *I  wander  like  a 
lost  Soul  upon  the  Stygian  Banks  staying  for  waftage,'  I  melt 
into  the  air  with  a  voluptuousness  so  delicate  that  I  am  content 
to  be  alone.  These  things,  combined  with  the  opinion  I  have 
of  the  generality  of  women — who  appear  to  me  as  children  to 
whom  I  would  rather  give  a  sugar  Plum  than  my  time,  form  a 
barrier  against  Matrimony  which  I  rejoice  in. 

Throughout  November  Keats  was  so  fully  absorbed  in 
attendance  on  his  dying  brother  as  to  be  unfit  for  poetry 
or  correspondence.  On  the  night  of  December  1  the  end 
came.  *  Early  the  next  morning/  writes  Brown,  ^I  was 
awakened  in  bed  by  a  pressure  on  my  hand.  It  was 
Keats,  who  came  to  tell  me  that  his  brother  was  no 
more.  I  said  nothing,  and  we  both  remained  silent  for 
a  while,  my  hand  fast  locked  in  his.  At  length,  my 
thoughts  returning  from  the  dead  to  the  living,  I  said, — 
"Have  nothing  more  to  do  with  those  lodgings, — and 
alone  too!  Had  you  not  better  live  with  me?^'  He 
paused,  pressed  my  hand  warmly,  and  replied,  "I  think 
it  would  be  better."  From  that  moment  he  was  my 
inmate. ' 


CHAPTER  XI 

DECEMBER  1818-JUNE 1819:  KEATS  AND  BROWN  HOUSEMATES: 
FANNY  BRAWNE:    WORK  AND  IDLENESS 

Removal  to  Wentworth  Place — Work  on  Hyperion — The  insatiable  Haydon 
— The  Misses  Porter — A  mingled  yarn — Charles  Lamb  and  punning — 
Hunt  and  his  satellites — Fanny  Brawne — A  sudden  enslavement — 
Severn's  impressions — ^Visit  to  Hampshire — The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes — 
Return  and  engagement — Ode  to  Fanny — Love  and  jealousy— Haydon 
again — Letters  to  Fanny  Keats — Two  months'  idleness — Praise  of 
claret — Bailey's  love-affairs — Fit  of  languor — Fight  with  a  butcher-boy 
— Sonnet-confessions — Reflections  ethical  and  cosmic — Meeting  with 
Coleridge — The  same  according  to  the  sage — A  tactful  review — Sonnets 
on  fame — La  Belle  Dame  Sans  Merci — The  right  version  quoted — The 
five  Odes — Their  date  and  order — A  fruitful  May — Indecision  and 
anxiety — A  confidential  letter — Departure  for  Shanklin. 

DiLKE  and  Brown,  as  has  been  said  already,  had  built 
for  themselves  a  joint  block  of  two  houses  in  a  garden 
near  the  bottom  of  John  Street,  Hampstead,  and  had 
called  the  property  Wentworth  Place,  after  a  name 
hereditary  in  the  Dilke  family.  DOke  and  his  wife 
occupied  the  larger  of  the  two  houses  forming  the 
block,  and  Brown,  who  was  a  bachelor,  the  smaller 
house,  standing  to  the  west.^  The  accommodation  in 
Brown's  quarters  included  a  front  and  back  sitting-room 

*  Later  occupants  re-named  the  place  Lawn  Bank  and  threw  the  two 
semi-detached  houses  into  one,  making  alterations  and  additions  the 
exact  nature  of  which  were  pointed  out  to  me  in  1885  by  Mr  William  Dilke, 
the  then  surviving  brother  of  Keats's  friend.  This  gentleman  also  showea 
me  a  house  across  the  road  which  he  himself  had  built  in  early  life,  occupied 
for  a  while,  and  then  let  on  a  sixty  years'  lease:  'which  lease,'  he  added, 
as  though  to  outlive  a  sixty  years'  agreement  contracted  at  thirty  were 
the  most  ordinary  occurrence  in  the  world,  'fell  in  a  year  or  two  ago.'  He 
died  shortly  afterwards,  age  93.     He  and  Mrs  Proctor,  the  widow  of 

321 


322     REMOVAL  TO  WENTWORTH  PLACE 

on  the  ground  floor,  with  a  front  and  back  bedroom  over 
them,  and  a  small  spare  bedroom  or  'crib'  where  a 
bachelor  guest  could  be  put  up  for  the  night.  The 
arrangement  with  Keats  was  that  he  should  share 
household  expenses,  occupying  the  front  sitting-room 
for  the  sake  of  quiet  at  his  work.  His  move  to  his  new 
quarters  does  not  seem  to  have  been  quite  so  immediate 
as  Brown  represents  it.  Beginning  a  new  journal- 
letter  to  his  brother  and  sister-in-law  a  week  or  two 
after  Tom's  death,  Keats  writes,  'With  Dilke  and 
Brown  I  am  quite  thick — ^with  Brown  indeed  I  am 
going  to  domesticate,  that  is,  we  shall  keep  house 
together.  I  shall  have  the  front  parlour  and  he  the 
back  one,  by  which  I  shall  be  able  to  avoid  the  noise 
of  Bentley's  Children — and  be  better  able  to  go  on 
with  my  studies — which  have  been  greatly  interrupted 
lately,  so  that  I  have  not  a  shadow  of  an  idea  for  books 
in  my  head,  and  my  pen  seems  to  have  grown  gouty 
for  verse.' 

This  phase  of  poetical  stagnation,  which  had  naturally 
set  in  as  his  cares  for  his  dying  brother  grew  more 
engrossing  towards  the  end,  passed  away  quickly.  By 
about  the  middle  of  December  Keats  was  settled  at 
Wentworth  Place,  whither  his  ex-landlord,  Bentley  the 
postman,  we  are  told,  carried  down  his  little  library  of 
some  hundred  and  fifty  books  in  a  clothes-basket  from 
Well  Walk.  In  spite  of  the  noisy  children  Keats  parted 
not  without  regret  from  the  Bentleys,  and  speaks  feel- 
ingly of  Mrs  Bentley's  kindness  and  attention  during  his 
late  trouble.  As  soon,  relates  Brown,  as  the  consola- 
tions of  nature  and  friendship  had  in  some  measure 
softened  his  grief,  he  plunged  once  more  into  poetry, 
his  special  task  being  Hyperion^  at  which  he  had  already 
begun  to  work  before  his  brother  died.  But  he  never 
got  into  a  quite  happy  or  uninterrupted  flow  of  work 
on  it.    Once  and  again  we  find  him  moved  to  lay  it 

Barry  Cornwall  the  poet — staunchest,  wittiest,  and  youngest-hearted  defier 
of  Time  that  she  was — were  the  only  two  persons  I  have  known  and  spoken 
to  who  had  knQwn  »nd  spoken  to  Keats. 


WORK  ON  HYPERION  323 

aside  for  a  bout  of  brotherly  gossip  with  George  and 
Georgiana  in  America.  'Just  now  I  took  out  my  poem 
to  go  on  with  it — ^but  the  thought  of  my  writing  so  Httle 
to  you  came  upon  me  and  I  could  not  get  on — so  I  have 
begun  at  random  and  I  have  not  a  word  to  say — and 
yet  my  thoughts  are  so  full  of  you  that  I  can  do  nothing 
else/  And  again:  'I  have  no  thought  pervading  me 
so  constantly  and  frequently  as  that  of  you — ^my  Poem 
cannot  frequently  drive  it  away — ^you  will  retard  it 
much  more  than  you  could  by  taking  up  my  time  if 
you  were  in  England.  I  never  forget  you  except  after 
seeing  now  and  then  some  beautiful  woman — but  that 
is  a  fever — the  thought  of  you  both  is  a  passion  with 
me,  but  for  the  most  part  a  calm  one.' 

This  letter,  covering  some  three  weeks  from  mid- 
December  to  Januaiy  4,  enables  us,  like  others  to  the 
same  correspondents,  to  lay  our  finger  on  almost  every 
strand  in  the  'mingled  yam'  of  Keats's  life  and  doings. 
Of  one  tiresome  interruption  which  befell  him  about 
Christmas  he  tells  nothing,  doubtless  in  order  to  spare 
his  brother  anxiety.  This  was  a  request  for  money 
from  the  insatiable  Hay  don.  The  correspondence  on 
the  matter  cannot  be  read  without  anger  against  the 
elder  man  and  admiring  affection  for  the  generous  lad — 
yet  not  foolishly  or  recklessly  generous — on  whom  he 
sponged.  Haydon's  only  excuses  are  a  recent  eye-trouble 
which  had  hindered  his  work,  and  his  inflated  belief, 
which  had  so  far  successfully  imposed  both  upon  himself 
and  his  friends,  in  his  own  huge  importance  to  art  and  to 
his  country.  Keats  writes,  showing  incidentally  how 
last  year's  critical  rebuffs  had  changed,  more  or  less 
permanently,  his  attitude  in  regard  to  the  public  and 
public  recognition: — 

Believe  me  Haydon  I  have  that  sort  of  fire  in  my  heart  that 
would  sacrifice  everything  I  have  to  your  service — I  speak 
without  any  reserve — I  know  you  would  do  so  for  me — I  open 
my  heart  to  you  in  a  few  words.  I  will  do  this  sooner  than  you 
shall  be  distressed:  but  let  me  be  the  last  stay — Ask  the  rich 
lovers  of  Art  first — I'll  tell  you  why — I  have  a  little  money 


324  THE  INSATIABLE  HAYDON 

which  may  enable  me  to  study,  and  to  travel  for  three  or  four 
years.  I  never  expect  to  get  anything  by  my  Books:  and 
moreover  I  wish  to  avoid  publishing — I  admire  Human  Nature 
but  I  do  not  like  Men.  I  should  like  to  compose  things  honour- 
able to  Man — but  not  fingerable  over  by  Men.  So  I  am  anxious 
to  exist  without  troubling  the  printer's  devil  or  drawing  upon 
Men's  or  Women's  admiration — in  which  great  solitude  I  hope 
God  will  give  me  strength  to  rejoice.  Try  the  long  purses 
— but  do  not  sell  your  drawings  or  I  shall  consider  it  a  breach  of 
friendship. 

Haydon  answers  in  a  gush  of  grandiloquent  gratitude, 
promising  to  try  every  corner  first,  but  intimating  pretty 
clearly  that  he  knew  his  wealthier  habitual  helpers  were 
for  the  present  tired  out  with  him.  One  of  his  phrases 
is  a  treasure.  'Ah  Keats,  this  is  sad  work  for  one  of  my 
soul  and  Ambition.  The  truest  thing  you  ever  said  of 
mortal  was  that  I  had  a  touch  of  Alexander  in  me !  I 
have,  I  know  it,  and  the  World  shall  know  it,  but  this 
is  a  purgative  drug  I  must  first  take.'  'This'  means  his 
own  perpetual  need  and  habit  of  living  on  other  people. 
In  the  next  letter  Haydon  of  course  accepts  Keats's 
offer,  and  in  the  Christmas  weeks,  when  he  should  have 
been  wholly  engrossed  in  Hyjperion,  Keats  had  much 
and  for  some  time  fruitless  ado  with  bankers,  lawyers, 
and  guardian  in  endeavouring  to  fulfil  his  promise.  To 
his  brother  he  only  says  he  has  been  dining  with  Haydon 
and  otherwise  seeing  much  of  him;  mentions  the 
painter's  eye-trouble;  and  quotes  him  as  describing 
vividly  at  second  hand  the  sufferings  of  Captain  (after- 
wards Sir  John)  Ross  and  his  party  on  their  voyage  in 
search  of  the  North- West  passage. 

From  Ross  in  Baffin's  Bay  the  same  letter  rambles  to 
Ritchie  in  the  deserts  of  Morocco,  and  thence  to  gossip 
about  the  best  way  of  keeping  his  own  and  George's 
brotherly  intimacy  unbroken  across  the  ocean;  about 
the  'sickening  stuff'  printed  in  Hunt's  new  Literary 
Pocket  Book  (it  was  when  he  was  seeing  most  of  Haydon 
that  Keats  was  always  most  inclined  to  harsh  criticism 
of  Himt) ;  about  Mrs  Dilke's  cats,  and  about  Godwin's 
novels  and  Hazlitt's  opinion   of  them,   and   the   rare 


THE  MISSES  PORTER  325 

pleasure  he  has  had  at  Haydon's  in  looking  through 
a  book  of  engravings  after  early  Italian  frescoes  in  a 
church  at  Milan.  ^ Milan'  must  be  a  mistake,  for 
there  are  no  such  engravings/  and  what  Keats  saw 
must  certainly  have  been  the  fine  series  by  Lasinio, 
published  in  1814,  after  the  frescoes  of  Orcagna, 
Benozzo  Gozzoli,  and  the  rest  in  the  Campo  Santo  at 
Pisa.  ^I  do  not  think  I  ever  had  a  greater  treat  out  of 
Shakespeare.  Full  of  romance  and  the  most  tender 
feeling — ^magnificence  of  draperies  beyond  everything  I 
ever  saw,  not  excepting  Raphael's.  But  Grotesque  to 
a  curious  pitch — ^yet  still  making  up  a  fine  whole — 
even  finer  to  me  than  more  accomplished  works — as 
there  was  left  so  much  room  for  Imagination/  It  is 
interesting  to  find  Keats  thus  vividly  awake,  as  very 
few  yet  were  either  by  instinct  or  fashion,  to  the  charm 
of  the  Italian  primitives,  and  to  remember  how  it  was 
a  copy  of  this  same  book  of  prints,  in  the  possession  of 
young  John  Everett  Millais  thirty  years  later,  which 
first  aroused  the  Pre-Raphaelite  enthusiasm  in  him  and 
his  associates  Gabriel  Rossetti  and  Holman  Himt  (the 
last-named  is  our  witness  for  the  fact). 

Keats  teUs  moreover  how  an  imknown  admirer  from 
the  west  country  had  sent  him  a  letter  and  sonnet  of 
sympathy,  with  which  was  enclosed  a  further  tribute  in 
the  shape  of  a  £25  note;  how  he  had  been  both  pleased 
and  displeased, — ^if  I  had  refused  it  I  should  have 
behaved  in  a  very  braggadocio  dunderheaded  manner, 
and  yet  the  present  galls  me  a  little';  and  again  how 
he  has  received  thi'ough  Woodhouse  a  glowing  letter  of 
sympathy  and  encouragement  from  Miss  Jane  Porter, 
the  then  famous  authoress  of  Thaddeus  of  Warsaw  and 
The  Scottish  Chiefs,  who  desires  his  acquaintance  on  her 
own  behalf  and  that  of  her  sister  Anna  Maria,  almost 
equally  popular  at  the  hour  by  her  romance  of  The 
Hungarian  Brothers.    By  all  this,  says  Keats,  he  feels 

^  The  only  set  of  engravings  existing  in  Keats's  time  after  pictures  at 
Milan  was  the  Raccol  a.  etc.,  of  Zanconi  (1813),  which  gives  only  panels 
and  canvases  by  masters  of  the  full  Renaissance  in  private  collections. 


326  A  MINGLED  YARN 

more  obliged  than  flattered — 'so  obliged  that  I  will  not 
at  present  give  you  an  extravaganza  of  a  Lady  Romancer. 
I  will  be  introduced  to  them  if  it  be  merely  for  the 
pleasure  of  writing  to  you  about  it — I  shall  certainly 
see  a  new  race  of  People/  Pity  he  failed  to  carry  out 
his  purpose:  pen-portraits  satirical  and  other  are  not 
lacking  of  these  admired  sisters,  the  tall  and  tragical 
Jane,  the  blonde  and  laughing  Anna  Maria,  'La  Pen- 
serosa'  and  'L'Allegra,'  but  a  sketch  by  Keats  would 
have  been  an  interesting  addition  to  them.  Still  in  the 
same  letter,  he  complains  of  the  sore  throat  which  he 
finds  it  hard  to  shake  off,  and  tells  how  he  has  given  up 
or  all  but  given  up  taking  snuff  (nearly  everybody  in 
that  generation  snuffed),  and  how  he  has  been  shooting 
with  Dilke  on  Hampstead  Heath  and  shot  a  tomtit, — 
a  feat  which  for  a  moment  calls  up  this  divine  poet  to 
our  minds  in  the  guise  of  one  of  the  cockney  sportsmen 
of  Seymour's  caricatures.  Never  mind:  he  can  afford  it. 
From  an  enquiry  about  the  expected  baby  in  America, 
— 'will  the  little  bairn  have  made  his  entrance  before 
you  have  this?  Kiss  it  for  me,  and  when  it  can  first 
know  a  cheese  from  a  Caterpillar  show  it  my  picture 
twice  a  week,' — from  this  he  passes  to  the  reassuring 
statement  that  the  attack  upon  him  in  the  Quarterly  has 
in  some  quarters  done  him  actual  service.  He  tells 
how  constrained  and  out  of  his  element  he  feels  in 
ordinary  society;  a  common  experience  of  genius,  and 
part  of  the  price  it  pays  for  living  at  a  different  level  and 
temperature  of  thought  and  feeling  from  the  herd.  'I 
am  passing  a  Quiet  day — ^which  I  have  not  done  for  a 
long  while — and  if  I  do  continue  so,  I  feel  I  must  again 
begin  with  my  poetry — ^for  if  I  am  not  in  action  of  mind 
or  Body  I  am  in  pain — and  from  that  I  suffer  greatly 
by  going  into  parties  where  from  the  rules  of  society 
and  a  natural  pride  I  am  obliged  to  smother  my  Spirit 
and  look  like  an  Idiot— because  I  feel  my  impulses 
given  way  to  would  too  much  amaze  them — I  live 
under  an  everlasting  restraint— never  reheved  except 
when  I  am  composing — so  I  will  write  away.'     And 


CHARLES  LAMB  AND  PUNNING         327 

resuming  apparently  on  Christmas  Day: — ^I  think 
you  knew  before  you  left  England;  that  my  next  subject 
would  be  "the  fall  of  Hyperion.''  I  went  on  a  little 
with  it  last  night,  but  it  will  take  some  time  to  get  into 
the  vein  again.  I  will  not  give  you  any  extracts, 
because  I  wish  the  whole  to  make  an  impression.  I 
have  however  a  few  Poems  which  you  will  Hke,  and  I 
will  copy  out  on  the  next  sheet.'  Nearly  a  week  later 
he  adds,  ^I  will  insert  any  little  pieces  I  may  write — 
though  I  will  not  give  any  extracts  from  my  large  poem 
which  is  scarce  begun.'  The  phrase  about  Hyperion 
must  be  taken  as  indicating  on  how  great  a  scale  he  had 
conceived  the  poem  rather  than  how  little  he  had  yet 
written  of  it.  In  point  of  fact  all  we  have  of  this  mighty 
fragment  must  have  been  written  either  by  his  brother's 
bedside  in  September-October  1818  (but  then  certainly 
only  a  little)  or  else  in  these  Christmas  weeks  from 
mid-December  to  mid-January  1818-19.  The  short 
poems  he  sends  are  the  spirited  sets  of  heptasyllabics, 
Fancy,  and  Lines  on  the  Mermaid  Tavern,  the  former 
one  of  the  best  things  in  the  second  and  lighter  class  of 
his  work;  and  with  them  the  fragment  written  for 
music,  'I  had  a  dove.'  In  relation  to  these  he  says  'It 
is  my  intention  to  wait  a  few  years  before  I  publish  any 
minor  poems — and  then  I  hope  to  have  a  volume  of 
some  worth — and  which  those  people  will  relish  who 
cannot  bear  the  burthen  of  a  long  poem.' 

Presently  Charles  Lamb  comes  for  a  moment  upon 
the  scene.  'I  have  seen  Lamb  lately — Brown  and  I 
were  taken  by  Hunt  to  Novello's — there  we  were  de- 
vastated and  excruciated  with  bad  and  repeated  pirns — 
Brown  don't  want  to  go  again.'  Punning,  like  snuffing, 
was  the  aU  but  universal  fashion  of  that  age,  as  those 
of  us  can  best  realize  who  are  old  enough  to  remember 
grandfathers  that  belonged  to  it;  and  judging  by  the 
specimens  Brown  and  Keats  have  themselves  left,  puns 
too  bad  for  them  are  scarce  imaginable.  Novello  is 
of  course  the  distinguished  organist,  composer  and 
music-publisher,  Vincent  Novello,  whose  Sunday  evening 


328  HUNT  AND  HIS  SATELLITES 

musical  parties  were  frequented  by  all  the  Lamb  and 
Himt  circle,  and  whose  eldest  daughter,  Mary  Victoria, 
was  married  some  ten  years  later  to  Cowden  Clarke.  At 
this  time  she  was  but  a  child  of  ten,  but  writing  many 
years  afterwards  she  has  left  a  vivid  reminiscence  of 
Keats  at  her  father's  house,  'with  his  picturesque  head, 
leaning  against  the  instruments,  one  foot  raised  on  his 
knee  and  smoothed  beneath  his  hands'  (an  attitude 
said  to  have  been  perpetuated  in  a  lost  portrait  by 
Severn).  Is  the  above  a  memory  of  the  one  evening 
only  which  Keats  himself  mentions,  or  of  others  when 
his  love  of  music  may  have  drawn  him  to  the  Novellos' 
house  in  spite  of  the  puns  and  of  company  for  the  moment 
not  much  to  his  taste  ?  For  the  ways  of  Hunt  and  some 
of  his  circle,  their  mutual  flatteries,  their  habit  of  trivial, 
chirping  ecstasy  over  the  things  they  liked,  their  super- 
fluity of  glib,  complacent  comment  rubbing  the  bloom 
off  sacred  beauties  of  art  and  poetry  and  nature,  were 
jarring  on  Keats's  nerves  just  now;  and  though 
perfectly  aware  of  Hunt's  essential  virtues  of  kind- 
heartedness  and  good  comradeship,  he  writes  with  some 
irritability  of  impatience: — 

Hunt  has  asked  me  to  meet  Tom  Moore  some  day  so  you  shall 
hear  of  him.  The  night  we  went  to  Novello's  there  was  a  com- 
plete set-to  of  Mozart  and  punning.  I  was  so  completely  tired 
of  it  that  if  I  were  to  follow  my  own  inclinations  I  should  never 
meet  any  one  of  that  set  again,  not  even  Hunt  who  is  certainly 
a  pleasant  fellow  in  the  main  when  you  are  with  him — but  in 
reality  he  is  vain,  egotistical,  and  disgusting  in  matters  of  taste 
and  in  morals.  He  understands  many  a  beautiful  thing;  but 
then,  instead  of  giving  other  minds  credit  for  the  same  degree 
of  perception  as  he  himself  professes — ^he  begins  an  explanation 
in  such  a  curious  manner  that  our  taste  and  self-love  is  offended 
continually.  Hunt  does  one  harm  by  making  fine  things  petty 
and  beautiful  things  hateful.  Through  him  I  am  indifferent  to 
Mozart,  I  care  not  for  white  Busts — and  many  a  glorious  thing 
when  associated  with  him  becomes  a  nothing.  This  distorts 
one's  mind — makes  one's  thoughts  bizarre — ^perplexes  one  in  the 
standard  of  Beauty. 

A  little  later  he  improvises  a  sample,  not  more  than 
mildly   satirical,   from   a   comedy   he  professes   to   be 


FANNY  BRAWNE  329 

planning  on  the  ways  and  manners  of  Hunt  and  his 
sateUites. 

In  the  same  letter  a  new  personage  makes  her 
momentous  entiy  on  the  scene.  ^Mrs  Brawne  who 
took  Brown^s  house  for  the  summer  still  resides  at 
Hampstead — she  is  a  very  nice  woman — and  her  daughter 
senior  is  I  think  beautiful  and  elegant,  graceful,  silly, 
fashionable,  and  strange — ^we  have  a  little  tiff  now  and 
then,  and  she  behaves  better,  or  I  must  have  sheered 
off/  This  Mrs  Brawne  was  a  widow  lady  of  West 
Indian  connexions  and  some  little  fortime,  with  a 
daughter,  Fanny,  just  grown  up  and  two  younger 
children.  She  had  rented  Brown's  house  while  he  and 
Keats  were  away  in  Scotland,  and  had  naturally  become 
acquainted  with  the  Dilkes  living  next  door  and  sharing 
a  common  garden.  After  Brown's  return  Mrs  Brawne 
moved  with  her  family  to  a  house  in  Downshire  Street 
close  by.  The  acquaintance  with  the  Dilkes  was  kept 
up,  and  it  was  through  them,  not  long  after  he  came 
back  from  Scotland,  that  Keats  first  met  Fanny  Brawne. 
His  next  words  about  her  are  these: — 

Shall  I  give  you  Miss  Brawne?  She  is  about  my  height  with 
a  fine  style  of  countenance  of  the  lengthened  sort — she  manages 
to  make  her  hair  look  well — her  nostrils  are  fine — though  a  little 
painful — her  mouth  is  bad  and  good — ^her  Profile  is  better  than 
her  full-face  which  indeed  is  not  full  but  pale  and  thin  without 
showing  any  bone.  Her  shape  is  very  graceful  and  so  are  her 
movements — her  Arms  are  good,  her  hands  bad-ish  her  feet 
tolerable — she  is  not  seventeen — but  she  is  ignorant — monstrous 
in  her  behaviour,  flying  out  in  all  directions,  calling  people  such 
names  that  I  was  forced  lately  to  make  use  of  the  term  Minx — 
this  is  I  think  not  from  any  innate  vice  but  from  a  penchant  she 
has  for  acting  stylishly.  I  am  however  tired  of  such  style  and 
shall  decline  any  more  of  it. 

An  attraction  which  has  begun  by  repulsion  is  ever 
the  most  dangerous  of  all.  The  heightened  emotional 
strain  of  his  weeks  of  tendance  on  his  dying  brother 
had  laid  Keats  open  to  both  influences  at  their  fullest 
power;  he  was  ripe,  as  several  passages  from  his  letters 
have  made  us  feel,  for  the  tremendous  adventure  of 


330  A  SUDDEN  ENSLAVEMENT 

love;  and  the  'new,  strange,  and  threatening  sorrow,' 
from  which  he  had  with  reHef  declared  himself  escaped 
when  the  momentary  lure  of  the  East-Indian  Charmian 
left  him  fancy-free,  was  about  to  fall  on  him  in  good 
earnest  now.  Before  many  weeks  he  was  hopelessly 
enslaved,  and  passion  teaching  him  a  sensitive  secretive- 
ness  and  reserve,  he  says  to  brother  and  sister  no  word 
more  of  his  enslaver  except  by  way  of  the  lightest 
passing  allusion.  From  his  first  semi-sarcastic  account 
of  her  above  quoted,  as  well  as  from  Severn's  mention  of 
her  Hkeness  to  the  draped  figure  in  Titian's  picture 
of  Sacred  and  Profane  Love,  and  from  the  full-length 
silhouette  of  her  that  has  been  preserved,  it  is  possible 
to  realise  something  of  her  aspect  and  presence. 

A  brisk  and  blooming  young  beauty  of  a  little  over 
eighteen  (Keats's  'not  seventeen'  is  a  mistake)  with 
blonde  hair  and  vivid  palish  colouring,  a  somewhat 
sharply  cut  aquiline  cast  of  features,  a  slight,  shapely 
figure  rather  short  than  tall,  a  liveliness  of  manner  border- 
ing on  the  boisterous,  and  no  doubt  some  taking  air  and 
effluence  of  youth  and  vitality  and  sex, — such  was  Fanny 
Brawne  externally,  but  of  her  character  we  have  scant 
means  of  judging.  Neither  she  nor  her  mother  can 
have  been  worldly-minded,  or  they  would  never  have 
encouraged  the  attentions  of  a  youth  like  Keats,  whose 
prospects  were  problematical  or  null.  It  is  clear  that, 
though  certainly  high-spirited,  inexperienced,  and  self- 
confident,  she  was  kind  and  in  essentials  constant  to  her 
lover,  and  patient  and  unresentful  under  his  occasional 
wild  outbursts  of  jealousy  and  suspicion.  But  it  seems 
equally  clear  that  she  did  not  haK  realise  what  manner 
of  man  he  was,  nor  how  high  and  privileged  was  the 
charge  committed  to  her.  She  had  no  objection  to  the 
prospect  of  a  long  engagement,  and  despite  her  lover's 
remonstrances  held  herself  free  in  the  meantime  to  enjoy 
to  the  full  the  pleasures  of  her  age  and  the  admiration  of 
other  men.^    One  day  early  in  the  new  year  Keats  took 

*  The  fullest  and,  it  must  be  said,  least  favourable  account  we  have  of 
her  is  in  the  retrospect  of  a  cousin  who  had  frequented  her  mother's  house 


SEVERN'S  IMPRESSIONS  331 

the  devoted  Severn  to  call  on  his  new  friends.  Severn 
was  much  pleased  with  the  mother,  who  seems  to  have 
been  in  truth  a  cultivated,  kind  and  gentle  person;  but 
he  did  not  take  to  the  daughter  or  even  much  admire 
her  looks,  and  though  perceiving  her  attraction  for 
Keats  did  not  then  or  till  long  afterwards  reahse  the 
fatal  strength  of  its  hold  upon  him.  ^That  poor  idle 
Thing  of  Womankind  to  whom  he  has  so  unaccountably 
attached  himself' — so  she  is  styled  by  Reynolds  in  a 
letter  to  Taylor  a  year  and  a  half  later.  Brown,  who 
knew  her  much  better,  and  whose  friendship  with  her 
sometimes  showed  itself  in  gallantries  at  which  Keats 
writhed  in  secret,  writes  of  her  always  in  terms  of 
kindness  and  respect,  but  never  very  explicitly.  The 
very  few  of  Keats's  friends  who  came  to  be  in  his  con- 
fidence, including  Dilke  and  his  wife,  seem  to  have  been 
agreed,  although  they  bore  her  no  ill  will,  in  regarding  the 
attachment  as  a  misfortune  for  him. 
So  it  assuredly  was:    so  probably  under  the  circum- 


as  a  young  boy  about  1819-20,  and  seventy  years  later  gave  his  impressions 
as  follows  {New  York  Herald,  April  12,  1889).  'Miss  Fanny  Brawne  was 
very  fond  of  admiration.  I  do  not  think  she  cared  for  Keats,  although 
she  was  engaged  to  him.  She  was  very  much  affected  when  he  died, 
because  she  had  treated  him  so  badly.  She  was  very  fond  of  dancing, 
and  of  going  to  the  opera  and  to  balls  and  parties.  Miss  Brawne's  mother 
had  an  extensive  acquaintance  with  gentlemen,  and  the  society  in  which 
they  mingled  was  musical  and  literary.  Through  the  Dilkes,  Miss  Brawne 
was  invited  out  a  great  deal,  and  as  Keats  was  not  in  robust  health  enough 
to  take  her  out  himself  (for  he  never  went  with  her),  she  used  to  go  with 
military  men  to  the  Woolwich  balls  and  to  balls  in  Hampstead;  and  she 
used  to  dance  with  these  military  officers  a  great  deal  more  than  Keats 
liked.  She  did  not  seem  to  care  much  for  him.  Mr  Dilke,  the  grandfather 
of  the  present  Sir  Charles  Dilke,  admired  her  very  much  in  society,  and 
although  she  was  not  a  great  beauty  she  was  very  lively  and  agreeable. 
I  remember  that  among  those  frequenting  Mrs  Brawne's  house  in  Hamp- 
stead were  a  number  of  foreign  gentlemen.  Keats  could  not  talk  French 
as  they  could,  and  their  conversation  with  his  fiancee  in  a  language  he  could 
not  understand  was  a  source  of  continual  disagreement  between  them. 
Keats  thought  that  she  talked  and  flirted  and  danced  too  much  with  them, 
but  his  remonstrances  were  all  unheeded  by  Miss  Brawne.'  Against  these 
impressions  should  be  set  Brown's  testimony,  contained  in  letters  of  the 
time  to  Severn  and  others,  to  her  signs  of  acute  distress  on  the  news  coming 
from  Italy  of  the  hopelessness  of  her  lover's  condition  and  finally  of  his 
death:  and  stronger  still,  her  own  words  written  in  later  years  to  Med  win, 
which  seem  to  show  a  true,  and  even  tender,  understanding  of  his  character 
if  not  of  his  genius  (see  below  p.  465). 


332  VISIT  TO  HAMPSHIRE 

stances  must  any  passion  for  a  woman  have  been. 
Blow  on  blow  had  in  truth  begun  to  fall  on  Keats,  as 
though  in  fulfilment  of  the  constitutional  misgivings  to 
which  he  was  so  often  secretly  a  prey.  First  the  depar- 
ture of  his  brother  George  had  deprived  him  of  his 
closest  friend,  to  whom  alone  he  had  from  boyhood 
been  accustomed  to  confide  those  obsessions  of  his 
darker  hours  and  in  confiding  to  find  reHef  from  them. 
Next  the  exertions  of  his  Scottish  tour  had  proved  too 
much  for  his  strength,  and  laid  him  open  to  the  attacks 
of  his  hereditary  enemy,  consumption.  Coming  back,  he 
had  found  his  brother  Tom  almost  at  his  last  gasp  in 
the  clutch  of  that  enemy,  and  in  nursing  him  had  both 
lived  in  spirit  through  all  his  pains  and  breathed  for 
many  weeks  a  close  atmosphere  of  infection.  At  the 
same  time  the  gibes  of  the  reviewers,  little  as  they  might 
touch  his  inner  self,  came  to  teach  him  the  harshness 
and  carelessness  of  the  world's  judgments,  and  the 
precariousness  of  his  practical  hopes  from  literature. 
Now  were  to  be  added  the  pangs  of  love, — ^love  requited 
indeed,  but  having  no  near  or  sure  prospect  of  fruition: 
and  even  love  disdained  might  have  made  him  suffer 
less.  The  passion  took  him,  as  it  often  takes  con- 
sumptives, in  its  fiercest  form:  Love  the  limb-loosener, 
the  bitter-sweet  torment,  the  wild  beast  there  is  no 
withstanding,  never  harried  a  more  helpless  victim.^ 

By  what  stages  the  coils  closed  on  him  we  can  only 
guess.  His  own  account  of  the  matter  to  Fanny  Brawne 
was  that  he  had  written  himself  her  vassal  within  a 
week  of  their  first  meeting:  which  took  place,  we  know, 
some  time  during  the  period  of  watching  by  Tom's 
sick-bed.  After  he  went  to  live  with  Brown  in  December 
they  must  have  met  frequently.  Probably  it  was  this 
new  attraction,  as  well  as  his  chronic  throat  trouble 
and  his  concern  over  Haydon's  affairs,  which  made  him 
postpone  a  promised  visit  to  Dilke's  relations  in  Hamp- 
shire   from    Christmas    until    mid-January.      He    then 

^  Upoq  8'  aire  (jl'  i  XuoiixiXT)?  Jovel 
YXux6xcxpov  itiLdxavov  6pxsT6v. — Sappho,  Fr.  40. 


THE  EVE  OF  ST  AGNES  333 

carried  out  his  promise,  going  to  join  Brown  at  Bed- 
hampton,  the  home  of  Dilke's  brother-in-law  Mr  John 
Snook.  He  liked  his  hosts  and  received  pleasure  from 
his  visit,  but  was  unwell  and  during  a  stay  of  a  fort- 
night only  once  went  outside  the  garden.  This  was  to 
a  gathering  of  country  clergy  reinforced  by  two  bishops, 
at  the  consecration  of  a  chapel  built  by  a  great  Jew- 
convertor,  a  Mr  Way.  The  ceremony  got  on  his  nerves 
and  caused  him  to  write  afterwards  to  his  brother  an 
entertaining  splenetic  diatribe  on  the  clerical  character 
and  physiognomy.  He  spent  also  a  few  days  with  Dilke's 
father  in  Chichester,  and  went  out  twice  to  dowager 
card  parties.  These  social  pleasures  were  naught  to  him, 
and  his  spirits,  like  his  health,  were  low.  But  his 
genius  was  never  more  active.  We  have  seen  in  the 
midst  of  what  worries  and  interruptions  he  had  worked 
before  and  during  Christmas  at  Hyjperion,  the  fragment 
which  in  our  language  stands  next  in  epic  quality  to 
Paradise  Lost,  At  Bedhampton  in  January,  on  some 
thin  sheets  of  thin  paper  brought  down  for  the  purpose, 
he  wrote  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  for  its  author  merely  'a 
little  poem/  for  us  a  masterpiece  aglow  in  every  line 
with  the  vital  quintessence  of  romance. 

No  word  of  Keats^s  own  or  of  his  friends  prepares  us 
for  this  new  achievement  or  informs  when  he  began  first 
to  think  of  the  subject.  It  must  of  course  have  been 
ripening  in  his  mind  some  good  while  before  he  thus 
suddenly  and  swiftly  cast  it  into  shape.  When  he  wrote 
three  months  earlier  of  having  to  seek  relief  beside  the 
sick-bed  of  his  brother  by  'plunging  into  abstract 
images,'  were  they  images  of  primeval  Greek  gods  and 
Titans  only,  or  were  these  contrasted  figures  and  colours 
of  mediaeval  romance  beginning  to  occupy  his  imagina- 
tion at  the  same  time?  Had  the  subject  perhaps  come 
into  his  mind  as  long  ago  as  the  preceding  March,  when 
Hunt  and  Reynolds  and  he  were  having  the  talks  about 
Boccaccio  which  resulted  in  Keats^s  Isabella  and  Rey- 
nolds's Garden  of  Florence  and  Ladye  of  Provence"!  We 
shall  see  that  Boccaccio  counts  for  something  in  Keats's 


334  RETURN  AND  ENGAGEMENT 

treatment  of  the  St  Agnes'  Eve  story,  so  that  the  sup- 
position is  at  least  plausible.  Or  may  it  even  have 
been  of  this  story  and  not,  as  is  commonly  assumed,  of 
Hyperion  that  he  was  thinking  as  far  back  as  September 
1817  when  he  wrote  to  Hay  don  from  Oxford  of  the  ^new 
romance'  he  had  in  his  mind?  Woodhouse  does  not 
throw  much  light  on  such  questions  when  he  tells  us  that 
'the  subject  was  suggested  by  Mrs  Jones/  This  name, 
uncongenial  to  the  muse  (excepting  the  muse  of  Words- 
worth) is  otherwise  unknown  in  connexion  with  Keats. 
Did  the  same  lady  also  tell  him  of  the  tradition  con- 
cerning St  Mark's  day  (April  25th),  and  so  become 
the  'only  begetter'  of  that  remarkable  fragment  The 
Eve  of  St  Mark,  which  he  wrote  (Woodhouse  again  is 
the  authority  for  the  dates)  between  the  13th  and  17th  of 
February  after  his  return  to  Hampstead  ?  In  connexion 
with  Keats  few  stones  have  been  left  unturned  for 
further  personal  or  critical  research,  but  here  is  one. 

Keats  was  back  at  Hampstead  by  the  end  of  January 
and  it  must  have  been  very  soon  afterwards  that  he 
became  the  declared  and  accepted  lover  of  Fanny 
Brawne,  savouring  intensely  thenceforward  all  the  tan- 
talising sweets  and  bitters  of  that  estate,  though  nothing 
was  said  to  friends  about  the  engagement.  From  the 
first  he  suffered  severely  from  the  sense  of  her  freedom 
to  enjoy  pleasures  and  excitements  for  which  neither 
his  health  nor  his  social  habits  and  inclinations  fitted 
him.  The  tale  of  the  Eve  of  St  Mark,  begun  and  broken 
off  just  at  this  time,  may  possibly,  as  Rossetti  thought, 
have  been  designed  to  turn  on  the  remorse  of  a  yoimg 
girl  for  sufferings  of  a  like  kind  inflicted  on  her  lover 
and  ending  in  his  death;  However  that  may  be,  we 
have  two  direct  cries  from  his  heart,  one  of  pure  love- 
yearning,  the  other  of  racking  jealousy,  which  were 
written,  if  I  read  the  evidences  aright,  almost  immedi- 
ately after  the  engagement  and  can  be  dated  almost 
to  a  day.  These  are  the  first  version,  which  has  only 
lately  become  known,  of  the  'Bright  Star'  sonnet,  and 
the  ode   To  Fanny  published  posthumously  by  Lord 


ODE  TO  FANNY  335 

Houghton.  Both  carry  internal  evidence  of  having  been 
written  before  the  winter  was  out:  the  sonnet  in  the 
words  which  invoke  the  star  as  watching  the  moving 
waters, 

Or  gazing  at  the  new  soft-fallen  mask 

Of  snow  upon  the  mountains  and  the  moors; 

the  ode  in  the  lines, 

I  come,  I  see  thee  as  thou  standest  there. 
Beckon  me  not  into  the  wintry  air.^ 

Now  it  happens  that  this  year  there  was  frost  and 
rough  weather  late  in  February,  with  snowfalls  on  the 
afternoon  of  the  24th  and  again  the  following  morning. 
I  imagine  both  sonnet  and  ode  to  have  been  written 
while  the  cold  spell  lasted,  the  sonnet  probably  before 
dawn  on  the  actual  morning  of  the  25th.'^  As  slightly 
changed  in  form  a  year  and  a  half  later  this  sonnet  has 
been  long  endeared  to  us  all  as  one  of  the  most  beautiful 
in  the  language:  I  shall  defer  its  discussion  till  we  come 
to  the  date  of  this  recast.  The  ode  has  flaws,  for  to 
make  good  or  even  bearable  poetry  out  of  that  humiU- 
ating  and  grotesque  passion  of  physical  jealousy  is  a 
hard  matter.  It  begins  poorly,  with  a  sense  of  discord,  in 
the  first  stanza,  between  the  choking  violence  of  feeling 
expressed  and  the  artificial  form  into  which  its  expression 
is  cast.  But  if  we  leave  out  this  stanza,  and  also  the  fifth 
and  sixth,  which  are  a  little  common  and  unequal,  we 
get  an  appeal  as  painful,  indeed,  as  it  is  passionate,  yet 
lacking  neither  in  courtesy  nor  dignity,  and  conveyed  in 
a  strain  of  verse  almost  without  fault: — 

Ah !  dearest  love,  sweet  home  of  all  my  fears. 

And  hopes,  and  joys,  and  panting  miseries, — 
To-night,  if  I  may  guess,  thy  beauty  wears 

A  smile  of  such  delight. 

As  brilliant  and  as  bright, 

*  There  is  no  autograph  of  this  ode,  only  transcripts  bv  friends,  and 
Mr  Buxton  Forman  was  most  likely  right  in  suggesting  that  the  true  reading 
for  'not'  should  be  'out.' 

2  Keats  was  staying  that  night  and  two  more  at  Mr  Taylor's  in  London: 
but  there  is  nothing  against  my  theory  in  this:  he  might  have  composed 
the  sonnet  as  well  in  Fleet  Street  as  at  Hampstead. 


336  LOVE  AND  JEALOUSY 

As  when  with  ravished,  aching,  vassal  eyes. 
Lost  in  soft  amaze, 
I  gaze,  I  gaze  I 

Who  now,  with  greedy  looks,  eats  up  my  feast  ? 

What  stare  outfaces  now  my  silver  moon  ? 
Ah !  keep  that  hand  unravished  at  the  least;  (_ 

Let,  let  the  amorous  burn — 

But,  pr'ythee,  do  not  turn 
The  current  of  your  heart  from  me  so  soon. 

O !  save,  in  charity. 

The  quickest  pulse  for  me. 

.  Save  it  for  me,  sweet  love !  though  music  breathe 

Voluptuous  visions  into  the  warm  air; 
Though  swimming  through  the  dance's  dangerous  wreath. 
Be  like  an  April  day. 
Smiling  and  cold  and  gay, 
A  temperate  lily,  temperate  as  fair; 
Then,  Heaven !  there  will  be 
A  warmer  June  for  me. 

Ah !  if  you  prize  my  subdu'd  soul  above 

The  poor,  the  fading,  brief  pride  of  an  hour; 
Let  none  profane  my  Holy  See  of  Love, 

Or  with  a  rude  hand  break 

The  sacramental  cake: 
Let  none  else  touch  the  just  new-budded  flower: 

If  not — may  my  eyes  close. 

Love !  on  their  last  repose. 

In  both  of  these  poems  Keats  soothes  himself  with 
thoughts  of  dying,  and  they  are  doubtless  among  the 
things  he  had  in  mind  when  two  or  three  months  later, 
in  the  ode  To  a  Nightingale,  he  speaks  of  having  invoked 
Death  by  soft  names  'in  many  a  mused  rhyme.' 

Fearing  the  intrusion  of  what  in  another  sonnet  of 
the  time  he  calls  'The  dragon-world  and  all  its  himdred 
eyes,'  he  was  intensely  jealous  in  guarding  his  secret 
from  friends  and  acquaintances;  and  in  writing  even 
to  those  dearest  to  him  he  lets  slip  no  word  that  might 
betray  it.  To  his  brother  he  merely  says,  '  Miss  Brawne 
and  I  have  now  and  then  a  chat  and  a  tiff,'  while  to  his 
young  sister  he  writes  on  February  27th  that  he  wishes 


HAYDON  AGAIN  337 

he  could  come  to  her  at  Walthamstow  for  a  month  or  so, 
packing  off  Mrs  Abbey  to  town,  and  get  her  to  teach  him 
*a  few  common  dancing  steps/ — for  what  reason,  to  us 
too  pathetically  evident,  he  of  course  gives  no  hint. 

On  February  14th,  about  a  fortnight  after  his  return 
from  Hampshire,  and  on  the  very  day  when  according 
to  Woodhouse  he  began  The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  Keats  had 
put  pen  to  a  new  journal-letter  for  America.  A  straw 
showing  how  the  wind  was  blowing  with  him  is  his 
mention  that  the  Reynolds  sisters,  whose  company 
used  to  be  among  his  chief  pleasures,  are  staying  at 
the  Dilkes  next  door  and  that  he  finds  them  'very 
dull.'  So,  we  may  guess,  will  they  on  their,  parts 
have  foimd  him.  His  only  other  correspondents  in 
these  weeks  are  Haydon  and  his  young  sister  Fanny. 
Early  in  March  Haydon  returned  to  the  charge  about 
the  loan.  'My  dear  Keats — ^now  I  feel  the  want  of 
3^our  promised  assistance.  .  .  .  Before  the  20th  if  you 
could  help  me  it  would  be  nectar  and  manna  and  all 
the  blessings  of  gratified  thirst.'  Keats  had  intended 
for  Haydon's  relief  some  of  the  money  due  to  him  from 
his  brother  Tom's  share  in  their  grandmother's  gift; 
which  he  expected  his  guardian  to  make  over  to  him  at 
once  on  his  appKcation.  But  difficulties  of  all  sorts 
were  raised,  and  for  some  time  after  the  new  year  he  had 
the  annoyance  of  finding  himself  unable  to  do  as  he  had 
hoped.  When  by-and-by  Haydon  writes,  in  the  true 
borrower's  vein,  reproaching  him  with  his  promise  and 
his  failure  to  keep  it,  Keats  repHes  without  loss  of  temper, 
explaining  that  he  had  supposed  himself  to  have  the 
necessary  means  in  his  hand,  but  has  been  baffled  by 
unforeseen  difficulties  in  gettiag  possession  of  his  money. 
Moreover  he  finds  that  much  less  remains  of  his  small 
inheritance  than  he  had  supposed,  and  even  if  all  he 
had  were  laid  on  the  table,  the  intended  loan  would 
leave  him  barely  enough  to  five  on  for  two  years. 
Incidentally  he  mentions  that  he  has  already  lent  sums 
to  various  friends  amounting  in  all  to  near  £200,  of  which 
he  expects  the  repayment  late  if  ever.    The  upshot  of 


338  LETTERS  TO  FANNY  KEATS 

the  matter  was  that  Keats  contrived  somehow  to  lend 
Haydon  thirty  pounds  which  he  could  very  ill  spare. 

To  his  young  sister  Keats's  letters  during  the  same 
period  are  charming.  He  lets  her  perceive  nothing  of 
his  anxieties,  and  is  full  of  brotherly  tenderness  and 
careful  advice;  of  interest  in  her  preparation  for  her 
approaching  confirmation;  of  regrets  that  she  is  kept 
so  much  from  him  by  the  scruples  of  Mr  and  Mrs  Abbey, 
with  humorous  admonitions  to  patience  under  that  lady's 
'unfeeling  and  ignorant  gabble';  and  of  plans  for 
coming  over  to  see  her  when  the  weather  and  his  throat 
allow  or  when  he  is  in  cash  to  pay  the  coach  fare.  On 
one  day  he  is  serious,  begging  her  to  lean  on  him  in  all 
things: — ^We  have  been  very  Kttle  together:  but  you 
have  not  the  less  been  with  me  in  thought.  You  have 
no  one  else  in  the  world  besides  me  who  would  sacrifice 
anything  for  you — I  feel  myself  the  only  Protector  you 
have.  In  all  your  little  troubles  think  of  me  with  the 
thought  that  there  is  at  least  one  person  in  England  who 
if  he  could  would  help  you  out  of  them — I  live  in  hopes 
of  being  able  to  make  you  happy.'  Another  day  he  is 
all  playfulness,  thinking  of  various  little  presents  to 
please  her,  a  selection  of  Tassie's  gems,  flowers  from  the 
Tottenham  nursery  garden,  drawing  materials — and 
here  follows  the  passage  above  quoted  (p.  10)  against 
keeping  live  birds  or  fishes: — 

They  are  better  in  the  trees  and  the  water, — though  I  must  con- 
fess even  now  a  partiaHty  for  a  handsome  globe  of  gold-ifish — 
then  I  would  have  it  hold  ten  pails  of  water  and  be  fed  continually 
fresh  through  a  cool  pipe  with  another  pipe  to  let  through  the 
floor — well  ventilated  they  would  preserve  all  their  beautiful 
silver  and  crimson.  Then  I  would  put  it  before  a  handsome 
painted  window  and  shade  it  all  round  with  Myrtles  and  Japonicas. 
I  should  like  the  window  to  open  on  to  the  Lake  of  Geneva — and 
there  I'd  sit  and  read  all  day  like  the  picture  of  somebody  reading. 

For  some  time,  in  these  letters  to  his  sister,  Keats 
expresses  a  constant  anxiety  at  getting  no  news  from 
their  brother  George  at  the  distant  Kentucky  settlement 
whither  he  and  his  bride  had  at  their  last  advices  been 


TWO  MONTHS'  IDLENESS  339 

bound.  Pending  such  news,  he  keeps  writing  up  his 
journal  for  them,  and  for  nearly  four  months  it  grew  and 
grew.  Still  in  February,  he  promises  to  send  in  the 
next  packet  his  ^Pot  of  Basil,  St  Agnes'  Eve,  and  if  I 
should  have  finished  it,  a  little  thing  called  the  Eve  of 
St  Mark.  You  see  what  fine  Mother  Radcliffe  names  I 
have — ^it  is  not  my  fault — I  do  not  search  for  them.  I 
have  not  gone  on  with  Hyperion,  for  to  tell  the  truth 
I  have  not  been  in  great  cue  for  writing  lately — I  must 
wait  for  the  spring  to  rouse  me  up  a  little ! ' 

As  it  fell  out,  he  never  went  on  either  with  Hyperion 
or  with  the  Eve  of  St  Mark,  the  romance  just  so  pro- 
misingly begun.  For  fully  two  months  after  breaking 
off  the  latter  fragment  (February  17th  or  18th)  he 
was  quite  out  of  cue  for  writing,  and  produced  nothing 
except  the  ode  To  Fanny  (if  I  am  right  as  to  its  date) 
and  a  few  personal  sonnets.  Many  causes,  we  can  feel, 
were  working  together  to  check  for  the  time  being  the 
creative  impulse  within  him:  the  mere  disturbing  influ- 
ence of  the  spring  season  for  one  thing;  discouragement 
at  the  public  reception  of  his  work  for  another,  though 
this  was  a  motive  external  and  relatively  secondary; 
the  results  of  a  deliberate  mental  stock-taking  of  his 
own  powers  and  performances  for  a  third;  and  more 
deep-seated  and  compulsive,  though  unexpressed,  than 
any  of  these,  the  love-passion  by  which  three-fourths 
of  his  soul  and  consciousness  had  come  to  be  absorbed. 
Here,  from  a  letter  to  Haydon  of  March  8,  is  an  example 
of  what  I  mean  by  his  mental  stock-taking.  The  resolu- 
tion it  expresses  is  of  course  more  a  matter  of  mood 
than  of  fixed  purpose: — 

I  have  come  to  this  resolution — ^never  to  write  for  the  sake 
of  writing  or  making  a  poem,  but  from  running  over  with  any 
little  knowledge  or  experience  which  many  years  of  reflection 
may  perhaps  give  me;  otherwise  I  will  be  dumb.  What  imagin- 
ation I  have  I  shall  enjoy,  and  greatly,  for  I  have  experienced 
the  satisfaction  of  having  great  conceptions  without  the  trouble 
of  sonnetteering.  I  will  not  spoil  my  love  of  gloom  by  writing 
an  Ode  to  Darkness. 

With  respect  to  my  livelihood,  I  will  not  write  for  it, — for  I 


340  PRAISE  OF  CLARET 

will  not  run  with  that  most  vulgar  of  all  crowds,  the  literary. 
Such  things  I  ratify  by  looking  upon  myself,  and  trying  myself 
at  lifting  mental  weights,  as  it  were.  I  am  three  and  twenty, 
with  little  knowledge  and  middling  intellect.  It  is  true  that  in 
the  height  of  enthusiasm  I  have  been  cheated  into  some  fine 
passages;   but  that  is  not  the  thing. 

Some  five  weeks  later,  about  mid-April,  we  find  that 
Haydon  himself  has  been  a  contributing  cause  to  Keats's 
poetic  inactivity  by  his  behaviour  in  regard  to  the  loan 
which  Keats  had  hoped  but  so  far  been  unable  to 
make  him.  The  failure  he  writes,  has  not  been  his 
fault : — 

I  am  doubly  hurt  at  the  slightly  reproachful  tone  of  your 
note  and  at  the  occasion  of  it, — for  it  must  be  some  other  dis- 
appointment; you  seem'd  so  sure  of  some  important  help  when 
last  I  saw  you — now  you  have  maimed  me  again;  I  was  whole, 
I  had  begun  reading  again — ^when  your  note  came  I  was  engaged 
in  a  Book.  I  dread  as  much  as  a  Plague  the  idle  fever  of  two 
months  more  without  any  fruit.  I  will  walk  over  the  first  fine 
day:  then  see  what  aspect  your  affairs  have  taken,  and  if  they 
should  continue  gloomy  walk  into  the  City  to  Abbey  and  get 
his  consent  for  I  am  persuaded  that  to  me  alone  he  will  not 
concede  a  jot. 

In  the  journal-letter  of  these  weeks  to  his  brother  and 
sister-in-law,  mentioning  how  he  had  been  asked  to  join 
Woodhouse  over  a  bottle  of  claret  at  his  coffee-house,  he 
breaks  into  a  rhapsody  over  the  virtues  and  wholesome- 
ness  of  that  beverage  and  adds  Hhis  same  claret  is  the 
only  palate-passion  I  have — I  forgot  game — I  must 
plead  guilty  to  the  breast  of  a  Partridge,  the  back  of 
a  hare,  the  back-bone  of  a  grouse,  the  wing  and  side  of 
a  Pheasant,  and  a  Woodcock  passimJ  Turning  to  his 
own  affairs,  he  says, — 

I  am  in  no  despair  about  them — my  poem  has  not  at  all  suc- 
ceeded ;  in  the  course  of  a  year  or  so  I  think  I  shall  try  the  public 
again — in  a  selfish  point  of  view  I  should  suffer  my  pride  and  my 
contempt  of  public  opinion  to  hold  me  silent — but  for  yours  and 
Fanny's  sake  I  will  pluck  up  a  spirit  and  try  again.  I  have  no 
doubt  of  success  in  a  course  of  years  if  I  persevere — but  it  must 
be  patience — for  the  Reviews  have  enervated  and  made  indolent 


BAILEY'S  LOVE-AFFAIRS  341 

-few  think  for  themselves.  These  Reviews  are 
getting  more  and  more  powerful,  especially  the  Quarterly — they 
are  like  a  superstition  which  the  more  it  prostrates  the  Crowd 
and  the  longer  it  continues  the  more  powerful  it  becomes  just 
in  proportion  to  their  increasing  weakness.  I  was  in  hopes 
that  when  people  saw,  as  they  must  do  now,  all  the  trickery  and 
iniquity  of  these  Plagues  they  would  scout  them,  but  no,  they 
are  like  the  spectators  at  the  Westminster  cock-pit — they  like 
the  battle — and  do  not  care  who  wins  or  who  loses. 

Among  other  matters  he  has  a  long  story  to  tell  about 
his  friend  Bailey's  fickleness  in  love.  It  appears  that 
Bailey,  after  a  first  unfortunate  love-affair,  had  during 
the  past  year  been  paying  his  addresses  to  Mariane  Rey- 
nolds, begging  that  she  would  take  time  to  consider  her 
answer,  and  that  while  her  decision  was  still  imcertain 
Bailey,  to  the  great  indignation  of  aU  the  Reynolds 
family  and  a  httle  to  Keats's  own,  had  engaged  himself 
in  Scotland  to  the  sister  of  his  friend  Gleig,  afterwards 
well  known  as  author  of  The  Subaltern  and  Chaplain 
General  to  the  Forces.  Next  Keats  begins  quoting  with 
a  natural  zest  of  admiration,  almost  in  fuH,  that  incom- 
parable piece  of  studied  and  sustained  invective,  Hazlitt's 
Letter  to  William  Gifford  Esqr.,  beside  which  Gifford's 
own  controversial  virulences  seem  relatively  blunt  and 
boorish.  Half  way  through  Keats  has  to  say  he  will 
copy  the  rest  to-morrow, — 

for  the  candles  are  burnt  down  and  I  am  using  the  wax  taper 
— ^which  has  a  long  snuff  on  it — the  fire  is  at  its  last  click — I 
am  sitting  with  my  back  to  it  with  one  foot  rather  askew  upon 
the  rug  and  the  other  with  the  heel  a  little  elevated  from  the 
carpet — I  am  writing  this  on  the  Maid's  tragedy  which  I  have 
read  since  tea  with  Great  pleasure.  Beside  this  volume  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher — there  are  on  the  table  two  volumes 
of  Chaucer  and  a  new  work  of  Tom  Moore's  called  Tom  Cribb's 
Memorial  to  Congress, — nothing  in  it.  These  are  trifles  but  I 
require  nothing  so  much  of  you  but  that  you  will  give  me  a  like 
description  of  yourselves,  however  it  may  be  when  you  are 
WTiting  to  me.  Could  I  see  that  same  thing  done  of  any  great 
Man  long  since  dead  it  would  be  a  great  delight:  As  to  know 
in  what  position  Shakespeare  sat  when  he  began  'To  be  or  not 
to  be' — such  things  become  interesting  from  distance  of  time  or 


342  FIT  OF  LANGUOR 

place.  I  hope  you  are  both  now  in  that  sweet  sleep  which  no 
two  beings  deserve  more  than  you  do — I  must  fancy  you  so — 
and  please  myself  in  the  fancy  of  speaking  a  prayer  and  a  blessing 
over  you  and  your  lives — God  bless  you — I  whisper  good  night 
in  your  ears  and  you  will  dream  of  me. 

This  is  on  the  13th  of  March.  Six  days  later  he  gives 
another  picture,  this  time  of  his  state  of  body  rather 
than  of  mind: — 

This  morning  I  am  in  a  sort  of  temper,  indolent  and  supremely 
careless — I  long  after  a  stanza  or  two  of  Thomson's  Castle  of 
Indolence — my  passions  are  all  asleep,  from  my  having  slumbered 
till  nearly  eleven,  and  weakened  the  animal  fibre  all  over  me, 
to  a  delightful  sensation,  about  three  degrees  on  this  side  of 
faintness.  If  I  had  teeth  of  pearl  and  the  breath  of  lilies  I 
should  call  it  languor,  but  as  I  am  I  must  call  it  laziness.  In 
this  state  of  effeminacy  the  fibres  of  the  brain  are  relaxed  in 
common  with  the  rest  of  the  body,  and  to  such  a  happy  degree 
that  pleasure  has  no  show  of  enticement  and  pain  no  unbearable 
power.  Neither  Poetry,  nor  Ambition,  nor  Love  have  any 
alertness  of  countenance  as  they  pass  by  me;  they  seem  rather 
like  figures  on  a  Greek  vase — a  Man  and  two  women  whom  no 
one  but  myself  could  distinguish  in  their  disguisement.  This 
is  the  only  happiness,  and  is  a  rare  instance  of  the  advantage  of 
the  body  over-powering  the  Mind. 

The  criticism  is  foolish  which  sees  in  this  passage  the 
expression  of  a  languid,  self-indulgent  nature,  and 
especially  foolish  considering  the  footnote  in  which 
Keats  observes  that  at  the  moment  he  has  a  black  eye. 
The  black  eye  was  no  doubt  the  mark  of  the  fight  in 
which  he  had  lately  well  thrashed  a  young  blackguard 
of  a  butcher  whom  he  found  tormenting  a  kitten.  That 
the  said  fight  took  place  just  about  this  time  is  clear  by 
the  following  evidences.  Cowden  Clarke,  in  his  recol- 
lections communicated  privately  to  Lord  Houghton, 
writes,  'The  last  time  I  saw  Keats  was  during  his 
residence  with  Mr  Brown.  I  spent  the  day  with  him; 
and  he  read  to  me  the  poem  he  had  last  finished — The 
Eve  of  St  Agnes.  Shortly  after  this  I  removed  many 
miles  from  London,  and  was  spared  the  sorrow  of 
beholding  the  progress  of  the  disease  that  was  to  take 


Pl.   IX 


Figures  on  a   Greek  vase  :    a  man  and  two  women 

FROM    AN    ETCHING    IN     PIRANESl's    VASI     E    CANDELABRI 


FIGHT  WITH  A  BUTCHER-BOY  343 

him  from  us.  When  I  last  saw  him  he  was  in  fine  health 
and  spirits;  and  he  told  me  that  he  had,  not  long  before 
our  meeting,  had  an  encounter  with  a  fellow  who  was 
tormenting  a  kitten,  or  puppy,  smd  who  was  big  enough 
to  have  eaten  him;  that  they  fought  for  nearly  an  hour; 
and  that  his  opponent  was  led  home.'  ^^  The  reading  of 
the  Eve  of  St  Agnes  fixes  the  date  of  Clarke's  visit  as 
after  Keats's  return  from  Chichester  at  the  end  of 
January,  and  a  remark  of  Keats,  writing  to  his  brother 
between  February  the  14th  and  19th,  that  he  has  not 
seen  Clarke  'for  God  knows  how  long,'  further  fixes  it 
as  after  mid-February;  while  the  latest  hmit  is  set  by 
the  fact  that  by  Easter  Clarke  had  gone  away  to  five 
with  his  family  at  Ramsgate,  where  they  had  settled 
after  his  father  had  given  up  the  Enfield  school. 
What  the  'effeminacy'  passage  really  expresses  is  of 
course  no  more  than  a  passing  mood  of  lassitude,  grate- 
fully welcomed  as  a  relief  from  the  strain  of  feelings 
habitually  more  acute  than  nature  could  well  bear. 
Ambition  he  was  schoohng,  or  trying  to  school,  himself 
to  cherish  in  moderation,  but  it  was  not  often  or  for  long 
that  the  stings  either  of  poetry  or  of  love  abated  for 
him  the  least  jot  of  their  bitter-sweet  intensity,  or  that 
anticipations  of  poverty  or  the  fever  of  incipient  disease 
relaxed  their  grip. 

Though  Keats's  letters  to  his  brother  and  sister-in-law 
contain  no  confidence  on  the  subject,  some  of  the  verses 
he  encloses  betray  in  abstract  form  the  strain  of  passion 
under  which  he  was  Hving;  notably  the  fine  weird 
sonnet  on  a  dream  which  came  to  him  after  reading  the 
Paolo  and  Francesca  passage  in  Dante,  and  the  other 
sonnet  beginning  'Why  did  I  laugh  to-night?'  In 
copying  this  last,  he  adds  careful  and  considerate  words 


1  In  his  printed  account  of  the  matter  Clarke  calls  the  victim  definitely 
a  kitten,  and  says  of  Keats:  'He  thought  he  should  be  beaten,  for  the 
fellow  was  the  taller  and  stronger;  but  Uke  an  authentic  pugilist,  my 
young  poet  found  that  he  had  planted  a  blow  which  "told"  upon  his 
antagonist;  in  every  succeeding  round  therefore  (for  they  fought  nearly 
an  hour),  he  never  failed  of  returning  to  the  weak  point,  and  the  contest 
ended  in  the  hulk  being  led  home.' 


344  SONNET-CONFESSIONS 

of  re-assurance  lest  his  brother  should  take  alarm  for 
his  sake: 

I  am  ever  afraid  that  your  anxiety  for  me  will  lead  you  to  fear 
for  the  violence  of  my  temperament  continually  smothered  down: 
for  that  reason  I  did  not  intend  to  have  sent  you  the  following 
sonnet — but  Look  over  the  two  last  pages  and  ask  yourselves 
whether  I  have  not  that  in  me  which  will  bear  the  buffets  of  the 
world.  It  will  be  the  best  comment  on  my  sonnet;  it  will 
show  you  that  it  was  written  with  no  Agony  but  that  of  ignorance; 
with  no  thirst  of  anything  but  Knowledge  when  pushed  to  the 
point  though  the  first  steps  to  it  were  through  my  human  passions 
— ^and  perhaps  I  must  confess  a  little  bit  of  my  heart — 

Why  did  I  laugh  to-night?    No  voice  will  tell: 

No  God,  no  Demon  of  severe  response 
Deigns  to  reply  from  heaven  or  from  Hell. — 

Then  to  my  human  heart  I  turn  at  once — 
Heart  1  thou  and  I  are  here  sad  and  alone; 

Say  wherefore  did  I  laugh  ?    O  mortal  pain ! 
O  Darkness !    Darkness !  ever  must  I  moan 

To  question  Heaven  and  Hell  and  Heart  in  vain  I 
Why  did  I  laugh  ?    I  know  this  being's  lease; 

My  fancy  to  its  utmost  blisses  spreads: 
Yet  could  I  on  this  very  midnight  cease 

And  the  world's  gaudy  ensigns  see  in  shreds. 
Verse,  fame  and  Beauty  are  intense  indeed 
But  Death  intenser — Death  is  Life's  High  meed. 

I  went  to  bed  and  enjoyed  uninterrupted  sleep.  Sane  I  went 
to  bed  and  sane  I  arose. 

This  is  yet  another  of  those  invocations  to  friendly 
Death  to  which  he  himself  refers  in  the  Ode  to  the  Night- 
ingale written  a  few  weeks  later,  and  in  its  phrase  'on 
this  very  midnight  cease'  anticipates  one  of  the  great 
lines  of  the  ode  itself. 

No  letter  of  Keats— or  of  any  one — ^is  richer  than  this 
of  February  to  May  1819  in  variety  of  mood  and  theme 
and  interest.  It  contains  two  of  the  freshest  and  most 
luminous  of  his  discursive  passages  of  meditation  on  life 
and  on  the  nature  of  the  soul  and  the  meaning  of  things: 
passages  showing  a  native  power  of  thought  untrained 
indeed,  but  also  unhampered,  by  academic  knowledge  and 
study,  and  hardly  to  be  suipassed  for  their  union  of 


REFLECTIONS  ETHICAL  AND  COSMIC  345 

steady  human  common-sense  with  airy  ease  and  play  of 
imaginative  speculation.  In  one,  starting  from  reflec- 
tions on  the  unforeseen  way  in  which  circumstances, 
like  clouds,  gather  and  burst,  reflections  suggested  by 
the  expected  death  of  the  father  of  his  friend  Haslam, 
he  calls  up  a  series  of  pictures  of  the  instinctiveness 
with  which  men,  like  animals, — the  hawk,  the  robin, 
the  stoat,  the  deer, — ^go  about  their  purposes;  considers 
the  rarity  of  the  exceptional  human  beings  whose  dis- 
interestedness helps  on  the  progress  of  the  world;  and 
then  turns  his  thoughts  on  himself  with  the  comment, — 

Even  here,  though  I  myself  am  pursuing  the  same  instinctive 
course  as  the  veriest  human  animal  you  can  think  of,  I  am, 
however  young,  writing  at  random,  straining  at  particles  of  light 
in  the  midst  of  a  great  darkness,  without  knowing  the  bearing 
of  any  one  assertion,  of  any  one  opinion.  Yet  may  I  not  in 
this  be  free  from  sin  ?  May  there  not  be  superior  beings,  amused 
with  any  graceful,  though  instinctive,  attitude  my  mind  may 
fall  into  as  I  am  entertained  with  the  alertness  of  the  Stoat  or 
the  anxiety  of  a  Deer? 

In  the  other  passage  he  disposes  of  all  Rousseau-Godwin 
theories  of  human  perfectibility  by  a  consideration  of 
the  physical  frame  and  order  of  the  world  we  live  in,  the 
flaws  and  violences  which  mar  and  jar  it,  and  which  its 
human  offspring  are  likely  to  derive  from  and  share  with  it 
until  the  end;  and,  provisionally  accepting  the  doctrine 
of  immortality,  he  broaches  of  his  own  a  scheme  of  the 
spiritual  discipline  for  the  sake  of  which,  as  he  suggests, 
the  life  of  men  on  this  so  imperfect  earth  may  have  been 
designed. 

In  marked,  not  always  entirely  pleasant  contrast  with 
these  passages  of  thought  and  beauty  Keats  sends  his 
brother  such  things  as  a  summary  of  a  satiric  fairy  story 
of  Brown's  and  an  impromptu  comic  tale  of  his  own  in 
verse,  much  in  Brown's  manner,  about  a  princess,  a 
mule,  and  a  dwarf:  both  of  them  apparently  to  his  mind 
amusing,  but  to  us  rather  silly  and  the  former  a  little 
coarse:  also  some  friendly  satiric  verses  of  his  own  on 
Brown  in  the  Spenserian  stanza.    He  tells  how  he  has 


346  MEETING  WITH  COLERIDGE 

been  turning  over  the  love-letters  palmed  off  by  way  of 
hoax  upon  his  brother  Tom  by  Charles  Wells  in  the 
character  of  a  pretended  'Amena/.and  vows  fiercely  to 
make  Wells  suffer  for  his  heartlessness;  gossips  further 
of  Dilke  and  his  overstrained  parental  anxiety  about  his 
boy  at  school;  asks  a  string  of  playful  questions  about 
his  sister-in-law  and  her  daily  doings;  and  in  another 
place  gives  us,  in  the  mention  of  a  casual  walk  and  talk 
with  Coleridge,  the  liveliest  record  we  have  of  the 
astonishing  variety  of  matters  and  mysteries  over  which 
that  philosopher  was  capable,  in  a  short  hour's  conver- 
sation, of  ranging  without  pause  or  taking  breath: — 

Last  Sunday  I  took  a  walk  towards  Highgate  and  in  the  lane 
that  winds  by  the  side  of  Lord  Mansfield's  park  I  met  Mr  Green 
our  Demonstrator  at  Guy's  ^  in  conversation  with  Coleridge — I 
joined  them,  after  enquiring  by  a  look  whether  it  would  be  agree- 
able— I  walked  with  him  at  his  alderman-after-dinner  pace  for 
near  two  miles  I  suppose.  In  those  two  Miles  he  broached  a 
thousand  things — let  me  see  if  I  can  give  you  a  list — Nightingales, 
Poetry — on  Poetical  Sensation — Metaphysics — Different  genera 
and  species  of  Dreams — Nightmare — a  dream  accompanied  with 
a  sense  of  touch — single  and  double  touch — a  dream  related — 
First  and  second  consciousness — the  difference  explained  between 
will  and  Volition — so  say  metaphysicians  from  a  want  of  smoking 
the  second  consciousness — Monsters — the  Kraken — Mermaids — 
Southey  believes  in  them — Southey's  belief  too  much  diluted — 
a  Ghost  story — Good  morning — I  heard  his  voice  as  he  came 
towards  me — I  heard  it  as  he  moved  away — I  had  heard  it  all 
the  interval — if  it  may  be  called  so.  He  was  civil  enough  to 
ask  me  to  call  on  him  at  Highgate. 

It  is  amusing  to  note  how  the  time  and  distance  covered 
by  his  own  encyclopaedic  volubility  shrank  afterwards 
in  Coleridge's  memory.  In  his  Table  Talk  taken  down 
thirteen  years  later  his  account  of  the  meeting  is  recorded 
as  follows  (with  the  name  of  his  companion  left  blank: 
I  fill  it  in  from  Keats's  letter):  ^A  loose,  slack,  not  well- 
dressed  youth  met  Mr  Green  and  myself  in  a  lane  near 
Highgate.     Green  knew  him,  and  spoke.    It  was  Keats. 

*  Joseph  Henry  Green,  afterwards  F.R.S.  and  Professor  of  Anatomy  to 
the  Royal  Academy ;  distinguished  alike  as  a  teacher  in  his  own  profession 
and  as  a  disciple  and  interpreter  of  Coleridge's  philosophy. 


THE  SAME  ACCORDING  TO  THE  SAGE   347 

He  was  introduced  to  me,  and  stayed  a  minute  or  so. 
After  he  had  left  us  a  Httle  way,  he  came  back,  and  said, 
"Let  me  carry  away  the  memory,  Coleridge,  of  having 
pressed  your  hand!''  "There  is  death  in  that  hand," 
I  said  to  Green,  when  Keats  was  gone;  yet  this  was,  I 
beHeve,  before  the  consumption  showed  itself  distinctly/ 
The  story  of  Coleridge's  observation  after  the  hand- 
shake is  no  doubt  exact:  the  'not  well-dressed'  in  his 
description  of  Keats  may  very  well  be  so  too:  but 
the  4oose'  and  'slack'  appHed  to  his  appearance  must 
have  been  drawn  from  the  sage's  inward  eye,  as  all 
accoimts  are  agreed  as  to  Keats's  well-knit  compactness 
of  person.  One  cannot  but  regret  that  Keats  failed  to 
follow  up  the  introduction  by  going,  as  invited,  to  see 
Coleridge  at  Highgate:  but  in  all  cases  save  those  of 
Hunt  and  Haydon,  his  contact  with  distinguished  seniors 
seems  thus  to  have  stopped  short  at  kindly  and  respectful 
acquaintance  and  not  to  have  been  pushed  to  intimacy. 
Another,  somewhat  divergent,  account  of  the  meeting 
taken  down,  also  from  Coleridge's  lips,  by  Mr  John 
Frere  three  years  earher  has  only  lately  been  published. 
Its  inaccuracy  in  details  is  evident,  but  there  is  much 
sense  as  well  as  kindness  in  Coleridge's  remarks  on  the 
reviews  and  their  effect: — 

C.  Poor  Keats,  I  saw  him  once.  Mr  Green,  whom  you  have 
heard  me  mention,  and  I  were  walking  out  in  these  parts,  and  we 
were  overtaken  by  a  young  man  of  a  very  striking  countenance 
whom  Mr  Green  recognised  and  shook  hands  with,  mentioning 
my  name;  I  wish  Mr  Green  had  introduced  me,  for  I  did  not 
know  who  it  was.  He  passed  on,  but  in  a  few  moments  sprung 
back  and  said,  'Mr  Coleridge,  allow  me  the  honour  of  shaking 
your  hand/  I  was  struck  by  the  energy  of  his  manner,  and 
gave  him  my  hand.  He  passed  on  and  we  stood  still  looking 
after  him,  when  Mr  Green  said,  *Do  you  know  who  that  is? 
That  is  Keats,  the  poet."  'Heavens!'  said  I,  'when  I  shook 
him  by  the  hand  there  was  death!'  This  was  about  two  years 
before  he  died. 

F.  But  what  was  it  ? 

C.  I  cannot  describe  it.  There  was  a  heat  and  a  dampness  in 
the  hand.  To  say  that  his  death  was  caused  by  the  Review  is 
absurd,  but  at  the  same  time  it  is  impossible  adequately  to  con- 


348  A  TACTFUL  REVIEW 

ceive  the  effect  which  it  must  have  had  on  his  mind.  It  is  very- 
well  for  those  who  have  a  place  in  the  world  and  are  independent 
to  talk  of  these  things,  they  can  bear  such  a  blow,  so  can  those 
who  have  a  strong  religious  principle;  but  all  men  are  not  born 
Philosophers,  and  all  men  have  not  those  advantages  of  birth 
and  education.  Poor  Keats  had  not,  and  it  is  impossible  I  say 
to  conceive  the  effect  which  such  a  Review  must  have  had  upon 
him,  knowing  as  he  did  that  he  had  his  way  to  make  in  the  world 
by  his  own  exertions,  and  conscious  of  the  genius  within  him.^ 

In  the  Leigh  Hunt  circle  it  had  always  been  the 
fashion  to  regard  with  contempt,  mingled  with  regret, 
Wordsworth's  more  childishly  worded  poems  and  ballads 
of  himible  life  such  as  The  Idiot  Boy  and  Alice  Fell.  The 
annoimcement  of  his  forthcoming  piece,  Peter  Bell,  now 
drew  from  John  Hamilton  Reynolds  an  anonymous  skit 
in  the  shape  of  an  adroit  and  rather  stinging  anticipatory- 
parody,  which  Taylor  and  Hessey  published  in  the  course 
of  this  April  despite  a  strong  letter  of  protest  addressed 
to  them  by  Coleridge  when  he  heard  of  their  inten- 
tion: a  protest  greatly  to  his  credit  considering  his  and 
Wordsworth's  recent  estrangement.  Keats  copies  for  his 
brother  the  draft  of  a  notice  which  at  Reynolds's  request 
he  has  been  writing  of  this  skit  for  the  Examiner,  taking 
care  to  turn  it  compatibly  with  due  reverence  for  the 
sublimer  works  of  the  master  parodied.  The  thing  is 
quite  deftly  and  tactfully  done,  and  seems  to  show  that 
Keats  might  have  made  himself,  could  he  have  bent  his 
mind  to  it,  a  skilled  hand  at  newspaper  criticism.  'You 
will  caU  it  a  little  pohtic,'  he  says  to  his  brother — 'seeing 
I  keep  clear  of  all  parties — I  say  something  for  and 
against  both  parties — and  suit  it  to  the  tone  of  the 
Examiner — ^I  mean  to  say  I  do  not  unsuit  it — and  I 
believe  I  think  what  I  say — I  am  sure  I  do — I  and  my 
conscience  are  in  luck  to-day — ^which  is  an  excellent 
thing.' 

At  intervals  throughout  these  two  months  Keats  asserts 
and  re-asserts  the  strength  of  the  hold  which  idleness  has 
laid  upon  him  so  far  as  poetry  is  concerned.    Thus  on 

^Comhill  Magazine,  April  1917:  'A  Talk  with  Coleridge,*  edited  by 
Miss  E.  M.  Green. 


SONNETS  ON  FAME  349 

March  13  to  his  brother  and  sister-in-law: — 'I  know  not 
why  poetry  and  I  have  been  so  distant  lately;  I  must 
make  some  advances  or  she  will  cut  me  entirely':  and 
again  to  the  same  on  April  15,  'I  am  still  at  a  standstill 
in  versifying,  I  cannot  do  it  yet  with  any  pleasure/  To 
his  young  sister  Fanny  he  had  written  two  days  earlier 
that  his  idleness  had  been  growing  upon  him  of  late,  'so 
that  it  will  require  a  great  shake  to  get  rid  of  it.  I 
have  written  nothing  and  almost  read  nothing — but  I 
must  turn  over  a  new  leaf.'  Within  the  next  two  weeks 
the  dormant  impulse  began  to  re-awake  in  him  with 
power.  As  we  have  seen,  he  had  never  quite  stopped 
writing  personal  sonnets.  Towards  the  end  of  the 
month  we  find  him  trying,  not  very  successfully,  to 
invent  a  new  sonnet  form,  but  soon  reverting  to  his 
accustomed  Shakespearean  type  of  three  quatrains 
closed  by  a  couplet.  Here  is  the  better  of  two  sonnets 
which  he  wrote  on  April  30  to  express  the  present 
abatement  of  his  former  hot  desire  for  fame: — 

Fame,  like  a  wayward  Girl,  will  still  be  coy 

To  those  who  woo  her  with  too  slavish  knees, 
'  But  makes  surrender  to  some  thoughtless  Boy, 

And  dotes  the  more  upon  a  heart  at  ease; 
She  is  a  Gipsy,  will  not  speak  to  those 

Who  have  not  learnt  to  be  content  without  her; 
A  Jilt,  whose  ear  was  never  whisper'd  close. 

Who  thinks  they  scandal  her  who  talk  about  her; 
A  very  Gipsy  is  she,  Nilus-born, 

Sister-in-law  to  jealous  Potiphar; 
Ye  love-sick  Bards,  repay  her  scorn  for  scorn. 

Ye  Artists  lovelorn,  madmen  that  ye  are ! 
Make  your  best  bow  to  her  and  bid  adieu, 
Then,  if  she  likes  it,  she  will  follow  you. 

The  thought  here  is  curiously  anticipated  in  a  passage  of 
Browne's  Britannia^s  Pastorals,  itself  reminiscent  of  a 
well  known  line  in  Theocritus.  Is  the  coincidence  a 
coincidence  merely,  or  had  the  Hues  from  Browne  been 
working  unconsciously  in  Keats's  mind? 

True  Fame  is  ever  liken'd  to  our  shade. 

He  sooneth  misseth  her,  that  most  hath  made 


350         LA  BELLE  DAME  SANS  MERCI 

To  overtake  her;  who  so  takes  his  wing, 

Regardless  of  her,  she'll  be  following: 

Her  true  proprieties  she  thus  discovers, 

'Loves  her  contemners  and  contemns  her  Lovers.** 

Two  days  earlier  Keats  had  copied  out  in  his  letter 
for  America,  side  by  side  with  the  words  for  a  common- 
place operatic  chorus  of  the  Fairies  of  the  Four  Elements, 
and  as  though  it  were  of  no  greater  value,  that  master- 
piece of  romantic  and  tragic  symbolism  on  the  wasting 
power  of  Love,  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci.  This  title 
had  already  been  haunting  Keats^s  imagination  when  he 
wrote  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes.  He  calls  by  it  the  air  to 
which  Porphyro  touches  his  lute  beside  the  sleeping 
Madeline.  It  is  the  title  of  a  cold  allegoric  dialogue  of 
the  old  French  court  poet  Alan  Chartier,  which  Keats 
knew  in  the  translation  traditionally  ascribed  to  Chaucer. 
But  except  the  title,  Keats's  new  poem  has  nothing  in 
common  with  the  French  or  the  Chaucerian  Belle  Dame. 
The  form,  the  poetic  mould,  he  chooses  is  that  of  a  ballad 
of  the  *  Thomas  the  Rhymer'  class,  in  which  a  mortal 
passes  for  a  time  into  the  abode  and  under  the  power  of 
a  being  from  the  elfin  world.  Into  this  mould  Keats 
casts — ^with  suchlike  imagery  he  invests — all  the  famine 
and  fever  of  his  private  passion,  fusing  and  alchemising 
by  his  art  a  remembered  echo  from  William  Browne, 
'Let  no  bird  sing,'  and  another  from  Wordsworth,  ^Her 
eyes  are  wild,'  into  twelve  stanzas  of  a  new  ballad  music 
vitally  his  own  and  as  weirdly  ominous  and  haunting  as 
the  music  of  words  can  be.  The  metrical  secret  lies  in 
shortening  the  last  line  of  each  stanza  from  four  feet^  to 
two,  the  two  to  take  in  reading  the  full  time  of  four, 
whereby  the  movement  is  made  one  of  awed  and  bodeful 
slowness — ^but  let  us  shrink  from  the  risk  of  laying  an 
analytic  finger  upon  the  methods  of  a  magic  that  calls 

1  Kal  4>e0yei  ^iKhvra  Kal  ad  <f>i\4ovTa  Su&Kei.     Theocr.  Idyll,  vi.  27. 

*I  use  the  foot  nomenclature  for  convenience,  because  to  count  by 
stresses  seems  to  make  the  point  less  immediately  clear,  while  to  count 
by  syllables  would  involve  pointing  out  that  in  the  last  lines  of  stanzas 
ii,  iv,  ix  and  xi  the  movement  is  varied  by  resolving  the  light  first  syllable 
into  two  that  take  the  time  of  one. 


THE  RIGHT  VERSION  QUOTED         351 

to  be  felt,  not  dissected.  Known  as  it  is  by  heart  to 
all  lovers  of  poetry,  I  will  print  the  piece  again  here, 
partly  for  the  reason  that  in  some  of  the  most  accessible 
and  authoritative  recent  editions  it  is  unfortunately 
given  with  changes  which  rob  it  of  half  its  magic: — 

O  what  can  ail  thee,  knight-at-arms 

Alone  and  palely  loitering  ? 
The  sedge  is  withered  from  the  lake. 

And  no  birds  sing ! 

0  what  can  ail  thee,  knight-at-arms 
So  haggard  and  so  woe-begone  ? 

The  squirrel's  granary  is  full, 
And  the  harvest's  done. 

1  see  a  lily  on  thy  brow 

With  anguish  moist  and  fever  dew; 
And  on  thy  cheek  a  fading  rose 
Fast  withereth  too — 

I  met  a  lady  in  the  meads 

Full  beautiful,  a  faery's  child; 
Her  hair  was  long,  her  foot  was  light. 

And  her  eyes  were  wild — 

I  made  a  garland  for  her  head, 

And  bracelets  too,  and  fragrant  zone; 

She  looked  at  me  as  she  did  love, 
And  made  sweet  moan — 

I  set  her  on  my  pacing  steed. 

And  nothing  else  saw  all  day  long; 

For  sideways  would  she  lean,  and  sing 
A  faery's  song — 

She  found  me  roots  of  relish  sweet, 
And  honey  wild,  and  manna  dew; 

And  sure  in  language  strange  she  said, 
I  love  thee  true — 

She  took  me  to  her  elfin  grot. 

And  there  she  gazed  and  sighed  full  sore, 

And  there  I  shut  her  wild,  wild  eyes 
With  kisses  four. 

And  there  she  lulled  me  asleep. 

And  there  I  dreamed,  ah  woe  betide. 

The  latest  dream  I  ever  dreamed 
On  the  cold  hill  side. 


352  THE  FIVE  ODES 

I  saw  pale  kings,  and  princes  too, 

Pale  warriors,  death-pale  were  they  all; 

Who  cried — *  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci 
Hath  thee  in  thrall.' 

I  saw  their  starv'd  lips  in  the  gloam 

With  horrid  warning  gaped  wide,  .^ 

And  I  awoke,  and  found  me  here  ^ 

On  the  cold  hill  side. 

And  this  is  why  I  sojourn  here 

Alone  and  palely  loitering. 
Though  the  sedge  is  withered  from  the  lake. 

And  no  birds  sing. 

Keats  of  course  gives  his  brother  no  hint  of  what  to 
us  seems  so  manifest,  the  appHcation  of  these  verses  to 
his  own  predicament,  and  only  adds  a  hght  and  laughing 
comment  on  one  of  the  rime-words.  Closing  his  packet 
a  few  days  later  (May  3)  he  adds,  as  the  last  poem  he 
has  written,  the  Od^  to  Psyche.  He  wrote,  as  is  well 
known,  four  other  odes  this  spring,  those  On  Indolencej 
On  a  Grecian  Urn,  To  a  Nightingale  and  To  Melancholy. 
The  Ode  to  Psyche  has  commonly  been  taken  to  be  the 
latest  of  the  five.  I  take  it,  on  the  contrary,  to  have 
been  the  first.  Had  he  been  ready  with  any  of  the  others 
when  he  finished  his  letter,  I  think  he  would  almost 
certainly  have  copied  and  sent  on  one  or  more  of  them 
also.  Coupled  with  his  re-iterated  assertion  of  complete 
poetic  idleness, — Hhe  idle  fever  of  two  months  without 
any  fruit,' — blasting  from  mid-February  until  well  past 
mid-April,  the  absence  of  all  the  four  other  odes  from 
this  packet  must  count  as  evidence  that  the  Ode  to  Psyche 
represents  the  first  wave  of  a  new  tide  of  inspiration — 
inspiration  this  time  not  narrative  and  creative  but  lyric 
and  meditative — and  that  the  rest  of  the  odes  followed 
and  were  composed  in  the  course  of  May.  Personally  I 
am  convinced  that  this  was  the  case.  I  make  no  excep- 
tion in  regard  to  the  ode  On  Indolence,  although,  seeing 
that  it  embodies  just  such  a  relaxed  mood  of  mind  and 
body  as  we  have  found  recorded  by  Keats  in  his  letter 
to  his  brother  under  date  March  19,  and  embodies  it 


THEIR  DATE  AND  ORDER  353 

with  the  self-same  imager}^,  it  is  usually  assumed  to  have 
been  written  at  or  very  nearly  about  the  same  date. 
But  Keats  in  the  ode  itself  expressly  tells  us  otherwise, 
calling  his  mood  at  the  hour  of  writing  one  of  'summer 
indolence '  and  defining  the  season  as  May-time,  when  the 
outdoor  vines  are  newly  bursting  into  leaf.  Of  course, 
it  may  be  answered,  a  poet  writing  in  March  may  per- 
fectly well  choose  to  advance  the  season  to  May  by  a 
poetic  fiction.  But  would  Keats  in  this  case  have  felt 
any  need  or  impulse  to  do  so?  I  doubt  it.  Moreover 
a  reference  to  the  poem  by  Keats  in  a  letter  of  early 
Jime  shows  that  phrases  of  it  were  still  hanging  freshly 
in  his  memory  and  seems  to  imply  that  it  was  a  thing  then 
lately  written.  What  happened,  I  take  it,  was  either  that 
Keats  let  the  March  vision,  with  its  imagery  of  symbolic 
figures  following  one  another  as  on  a  Greek  sculptured 
urn,  ripen  in  his  mind  until  he  was  ready  to  compose 
upon  it,  and  then  attributed  the  vision  itself  to  the 
season  when  he  was  actually  putting  it  into  verse;  or 
else  that,  having  fallen  some  time  in  May  into  a  second 
mood  of  drowsiness  and  relaxation  nearly  repeating  that 
of  March,  the  same  imagery  for  its  expression  arose 
naturally  again  in  his  mind. 

The  ode  On  a  Grecian  Urn  is  obviously  of  kindred,  and 
probably  of  contemporary,  inspiration  with  that  On 
Indolence,  and  if  the  one  belongs  to  May  so  doubtless 
does  the  other.  That  this  is  true  of  the  Nightingale 
ode  we  know.  Some  time  early  in  May,  nightingales 
heard  both  in  the  Wentworth  Place  garden  and  in  the 
grove  beside  the  Spaniards  inn  at  the  upper  end  of 
the  heath  set  Keats  brooding  on  the  contrast  between  the 
age-long  permanence  of  that  bird-song,  older  than  history, 
and  the  fleeting  lives  of  the  generations  of  men  that  have 
listened  to  it;  and  one  morning  he  took  his  chair  out 
under  a  plum-tree  in  the  garden  and  wrote  down  the 
immortal  verses,  in  and  out  and  back  and  forth  on  a 
couple  of  loose  sheets  which  Brown,  two  hours  after 
seeing  him  go  out,  foimd  him  folding  away  carelessly 
behind  some  books  in  his  room.    This  discovery,  says 


354  A  FRUITFUL  MAY 

Brown,  made  him  search  for  more  such  neglected  scraps; 
and  Keats  acquiesced  in  the  search,  and  moreover  gave 
Brown  leave  to  make  copies  of  anything  he  might  find.^ 
Haydon  tells  how  Keats  recited  the  new  ode  to  him,  'in 
his  low,  tremulous  under-tone,'  as  they  walked  together 
in  the  Hampstead  meadows;  and  it  was  no  doubt  on 
Haydon's  suggestion  that  Keats  let  James  Elmes,  a 
subservient  ally  of  Haydon^s  in  all  his  battles  with  the 
academic  powers,  have  it  for  publication  in  his  periodical, 
the  Annals  of  the  Fine  Arts,  during  the  following  July. 
For  the  date  of  the  Ode  on  Melancholy  the  clues  are 
less  definite.  Burton^s  Anatomy  has  clearly  to  do  with 
inspiring  it,  but  of  this,  and  especially  of  the  sections 
on  the  cure  of  Love-Melancholy,  Keats' s  letters  and 
some  of  his  verses  furnish  evidence  that  he  had  been 
much  of  a  reader  all  the  spring.  Particular  phrases, 
however,  in  letters  of  May  and  early  June  expressing  a 
very  similar  strain  of  feeling  to  that  of  the  ode,  besides  its 
general  resemblance  to  the  rest  of  the  group  both  as  to 
form  and  mood,  may  be  taken  as  approximately  dating  it. 
Following  these  so  fruitful  labours  (if  I  am  right  as 
to  the  dates)  of  May,  came  a  month  of  strained  indecision 
and  anxiety  during  which  Keats  again  could  do  no  work. 
Questions  of  his  own  fortune  and  future  were  weighing 
heavily  on  his  mind.  For  the  time  being  he  could  not 
touch  such  small  remainder  of  his  grandmother's  legacy  as 
was  still  unexpended.  A  lawsuit  threatened  by  the  widow 
of  his  imcle  Captain  Jennings  against  his  guardian  Mr 
Abbey,  in  connexion  with  the  administration  of  the 
trust,  had  had  the  effect  for  the  time  being  of  stopping 
his  suppHes  from  that  quarter  altogether.  Thereupon  he 
very  gently  asked  Haydon  to  make  an  effort  to  repay  his 
recent  loan;  who  not  only  made  none — 'he  did  not,' 

1  Brown,  writing  many  years  after  the  events,  must  be  a  little  out 
here,  seeing  that  already  on  April  30th  Keats  tells  his  brother  that  Brown 
is  busv  'rummaging  out  his  Keats's  old  sins,  that  is  to  say  sonnets.'  (Note 
that  iCeats  mentions  no  odes.)  Brown  is  in  like  manner  wrong  in  remem- 
bering the  draft  of  the  Nightingale  ode  as  written  on  'four  or  five  scraps' 
when  it  was  in  fact  written  on  two,  as  became  apparent  when  it  appeared 
in  the  market  thirteen  years  ago  (see  Monthly  Review,  March  1903).  It 
is  now  in  the  collection  of  Lord  Crewe. 


INDECISION  AND  ANXIETY  355 

says  Keats,  'seem  to  care  much  about  it,  but  let  me  go 
without  my  money  ahnost  with  nonchalance/  This  was 
too  much  even  for  Keats's  patience,  and  he  declares  that 
he  shall  never  count  Hay  don  a  friend  again.  Neverthe- 
less he  by  and  by  let  old  affection  resimie  its  sway,  and 
entered  into  the  other's  interests  and  endured  his  exhor- 
tations as  kindly  as  ever.  Apart  from  Mrs  Jennings's 
bequest,  there  was  a  not  inconsiderable  sum  which,  as 
we  know,  had  been  left  invested  by  Mr  Jennings  for  the 
direct  benefit  of  his  Keats  grandchildren;  but  this  sum 
could  not  be  divided  until  Fanny  Keats  came  of  age, 
and  there  seems  to  have  been  no  thought  of  John's 
anticipating  his  reversionary  share.  Indeed  it  is  doubt- 
ful if  the  veiy  existence  of  these  and  other  fxmds  lying 
by  for  them  had  not  at  this  time  been  forgotten.^ 

In  this  predicament  Keats  began  very  seriously  to 
entertain  the  idea,  which  we  have  seen  broached  by  him 
several  times  already,  of  seeking  the  post  of  surgeon  on 
an  East  Indiaman  as  at  least  a  temporary  means  of 
livelihood.  He  mentions  the  idea  not  only  to  George 
and  to  his  young  sister,  but  he  debates  it  with  a  new 
correspondent,  one  of  the  Miss  Jeffreys  of  Teignmouth, 
whom  he  suddenly  now  addresses  in  terms  of  confidence 
which  show  how  warm  must  have  been  their  temporary 
friendship  the  year  before: — 

Your  advice  about  the  Indiaman  is  a  very  wise  advice,  because 
it  just  suits  me,  though  you  are  a  little  in  the  wrong  concerning 
its  destroying  the  energies  of  Mind:  on  the  contrary  it  would 
be  the  finest  thing  in  the  world  to  strengthen  them — to  be  thrown 
among  people  who  care  not  for  you,  with  whom  you  have  no 
sympathies  forces  the  Mind  upon  its  own  resources,  and  leaves 
it  free  to  make  its  speculations  of  the  differences  of  human 
character  and  to  class  them  with  the  calmness  of  a  Botanist.  An 
Indiaman  is  a  little  world.  One  of  the  great  reasons  that  the 
English  have  produced  the  finest  writers  in  the  world  is,  that 
the  English  world  has  ill-treated  them  during  their  lives  and 
foster'd   them   after  their  deaths.     They  have  in  general  been 

^When  in  1823-4  their  existence  was  disclosed  and  they  were  divided 
on  the  order  of  the  Court  of  Chancery  between  George  Keats  and  his 
sister,  they  amounts  with  accumulations  of  interest  to  a  little  over  £4500. 


356  A  CONFIDENTIAL  LETTER 

trampled  aside  into  the  bye  paths  of  life  and  seen  the  festerings 
of  Society.  They  have  not  been  treated  Hke  the  Raphaels  of 
Italy.  And  where  is  the  Englishman  and  Poet  who  has  given 
a  magnificent  Entertainment  at  the  christening  of  one  of  his 
Hero's  Horses  as  Boyardo  did  ?  He  had  a  Castle  in  the  Appenine. 
He  was  a  noble  Poet  of  Romance;  not  a  miserable  and  mighty 
Poet  of  the  human  heart.  The  middle  age  of  Shakespeare  was 
all  clouded  over;  his  days  were  not  more  happy  than  Hamlet's 
who  is  perhaps  more  like  Shakespeare  himself  in  his  common 
every  day  Life  than  any  other  of  his  Characters — Ben  Jonson 
was  a  common  Soldier  and  in  the  Low  Countries  in  the 
face  of  two  armies,  fought  a  single  combat  with  a  French  Trooper 
and  slew  him — For  all  this  I  will  not  go  on  board  an  Indiaman, 
nor  for  example's  sake  run  my  head  into  dark  alleys:  I  daresay 
my  discipline  is  to  come,  and  plenty  of  it  too.  I  have  been  very 
idle  lately,  very  averse  to  writing;  both  from  the  overpowering 
idea  of  our  dead  poets  and  from  abatement  of  my  love  of  fame. 
I  hope  I  am  a  little  more  of  a  Philosopher  than  I  was,  conse- 
quently a  little  less  of  a  versifying  Pet-lamb.  I  have  put  no  more 
in  Print  or  you  should  have  had  it.  You  will  judge  of  my  1819 
temper  when  I  tell  you  that  the  thing  I  have  most  enjoyed  this 
year  has  been  writing  an  ode  to  Indolence. 

The  reader  will  have  noticed  in  the  phrase  about 
'versifying  Pet-lamb'  a  repetition  from  this  very  ode 
On  Indolence.  Here  is  another  confidence  imparted  to 
the  same  correspondent  concerning  his  present  mood 
and  disposition: — 

I  have  been  always  till  now  almost  as  careless  of  the  world 
as  a  fly — my  troubles  were  all  of  the  Imagination — My  brother 
George  always  stood  between  me  and  any  dealings  with  the 
world.  Now  I  find  I  must  buffet  it — I  must  take  my  stand 
upon  some  vantage  ground  and  begin  to  fight — I  must  choose 
between  despair  and  Energy — I  choose  the  latter  though  the 
world  has  taken  on  a  quakerish  look  with  me,  which  I  once  thought 
was  impossible — 

*  Nothing  can  bring  back  the  hour 
Of  splendour  in  the  grass  and  glory  in  the  flower.' 

I  once  thought  this  a  Melancholist's  dream. 

His  immediate  object  in  writing  had  been  to  ask,  in  case 
he  should  decide  against  the  Indiaman  project  and  in 
favour  of  another  attempt  at  the  literary  life,  for  the 


DEPARTURE  FOR  SHANKLIN     357 

address  of  a  cheap  lodging  somewhere  in  the  Teign 
valley,  the  beauties  of  which,  seen  in  glimpses  through 
the  rain,  he  had  sung  in  some  doggerel  stanzas  the  year 
before.  Brown,  more  than  ever  impressed  during  these 
last  months  with  the  power  and  promise  of  his  friend's 
genius,  was  dead  against  the  Indiaman  scheme  and  in 
the  end  persuaded  Keats  to  accept  an  advance  of  money 
for  his  present  needs  and  to  devote  the  summer  to  work 
in  the  country.  Part  of  such  work  was  to  be  upon  a 
tragedy  to  be  written  by  the  two  in  collaboration  and 
on  a  basis  of  half  profits.  Brown  had  not  less  behef  in 
Keats's  future  than  affection  for  his  person,  and  it  was 
the  two  combined  that  made  him  ready  and  eager,  as 
he  frankly  told  Keats,  to  sail  in  the  same  boat  with 
him.  In  the  end  the  Devonshire  idea  gave  place  to  a 
new  plan,  that  of  joining  the  invalid  James  Rice  for  a 
stay  at  Shanklin.  'I  have  given  up  the  idea  of  the 
Indiaman,'  Keats  writes  to  his  young  sister  on  June  9; 
'I  cannot  resolve  to  give  up  my  favourite  studies:  so 
I  propose  to  retire  once  more.  A  friend  of  Mine  who 
has  an  ill  state  of  health  called  on  me  yesterday  and 
proposed  to  spend  a  little  time  with  him  at  the  back 
of  the  Isle  of  Wight  where  he  said  we  might  live  cheaply. 
I  agreed  to  his  proposal.' 


CHAPTER  XII 

JUNE  1819-JANUARY   1820:    SHANKLIN,  WINCHESTER, 
HAMPSTEAD:    TROUBLE  AND  HEALTH  FAILURE 

Work  on  Otho  and  Lamia — Letters  to  Fanny  Brawne — Keats  as  lover — 
An  imagined  future — Change  to  Winchester — Work  and  fine  weather 
— Ill  news  from  George — A  run  to  town — A  talk  with  Woodhouse — 
Woodhouse  as  critic — Alone  at  Winchester — Spirited  letters:  to  his 
brother — To  Reynolds,  Brown,  and  Dilke — Hopes  and  resolutions — 
Will  work  for  the  press — Attempt  and  breakdown — Return  to  Went- 
worth  Place — Morning  and  evening  tasks — Cries  of  passion — Signs 
of  despondency — Testimony  of  Brown — Haydon's  exaggerations — 
Schemes  and  doings — Visit  of  George  Keats — Pleasantry  and  bitter- 
ness— Beginning  of  the  end. 

By  the  last  days  of  June  Keats  was  settled  with  Rice 
in  the  village  of  Shanklin,  in  a  lodging  above  the  cliff 
and  a  little  way  back  from  the  sea/  and  forthwith  got 
to  work  upon  a  new  poetical  romance.  Lamia,  at  which 
he  seems  to  have  made  some  beginning  before  he  left 
Hampstead.  He  found  the  subject,  that  of  the  en- 
chantress of  Corinth  who  under  her  woman's  guise 
was  really  a  serpent,  in  Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy, 
a  book  in  these  days  often  in  his  hands,  and  for  the 
form  of  his  narrative  chose  rimed  heroics,  only  this 
time  leaning  on  Dryden  as  his  model  instead  of  the 
Elizabethans. 

Rice's  health  was  at  this  time  worse  than  ever,  and 
Keats  himself  was  far  from  well;  his  throat  chronically 

1  Local  tradition,  I  am  informed,  used  to  identify  the  house  as  one 
called  Eglantine  Villa,  now  demolished.  The  existing  'Keats  Crescent' 
was  so  named,  not  as  indicating  the  special  neighbourhood  where  the  poet 
lodged,  but  only  by  way  of  general  commemoration  of  bis  sojourn. 

358 


WORK  ON  OTHO  AND  LAMIA  359 

sore,  his  nerves  unstrung,  his  heart,  in  despite  of  dis- 
tance, knowing  Httle  rest  from  agitation  between  the 
pains  and  joys  of  love.  As  long  as  Rice  and  he  were 
alone  together  at  Shanklin,  the  two  ailing  and  anxious 
men,  fast  friends  as  they  were,  depressed  and  did  each 
other  harm.  Things  went  better  when  Brown  with  his 
settled  good  health  and  good  spirits  came  to  join  them. 
Soon  afterwards  Rice  left,  and  Brown  and  Keats  then 
got  to  work  diligently  at  the  joint  task  they  had  set 
themselves,  that  of  writing  a  tragedy  suitable  for  the 
stage.  What  struggling  man  or  woman  of  letters  has 
not  at  one  time  or  another  shared  the  hope  which 
animated  them,  that  this  way  lay  the  road  to  success 
and  competence?  Brown,  whose  opera  Narensky  had 
made  a  hit  in  its  day,  and  brought  him  in  a  simi  variously 
stated  at  £300  or  £500,  was  supposed  to  possess  the 
requisite  stage  experience.  To  him  were  assigned  the 
plot  and  construction  of  the  play,  for  which  he  was  to 
receive  half  profits  in  the  event  of  success,  while  Keats 
undertook  to  compose  the  dialogue.  The  subject  was 
one  taken  from  the  history  of  the  Emperor  Otho  the 
Great.  The  two  friends  sat  opposite  each  other  at 
the  same  table,  and  Keats  wrote  scene  after  scene  as 
Brown  sketched  it  out  to  him,  in  each  case  without 
enquiring  what  was  to  come  next.  The  collaboration 
of  genius  and  mediocrity  rarely  succeeds,  and  it  seems 
hard  to  conceive  a  more  unpromising  mode  of  it  than 
this.  Besides  the  work  by  means  of  which  Keats  thus 
hoped,  at  least  in  sanguine  hours,  to  find  an  escape 
from  material  difficulties,  he  was  busily  engaged  work- 
ing by  himseK  on  Lamia,  But  a  cloud  of  depression 
continued  to  hang  over  him.  The  climate  of  Shanklin 
was  against  him:  the  quarter  where  they  lodged  lay 
screened  by  hills  except  from  the  south-east,  whence, 
as  he  afterwards  wrote,  'came  the  damps  of  the  sea, 
which  having  no  egress,  the  air  would  for  days  together 
take  on  an  unhealthy  idiosyncrasy  altogether  enervating 
and  weakening  as  a  city  smoke.'  After  a  stay  of 
some    six    weeks,    Keats    consequently    made    up    his 


360  LETTERS  TO  FANNY  BRAWNE 

mind  to  move  with  Brown  to  the  more  bracing  air  of 
Winchester. 

From  these  weeks  at  Shanklin  date  the  earhest  of 
the  preserved  series  of  Keats's  love-letters  to  Fanny 
Brawne.  More  than  any  man,  more  certainly  than 
any  other  unripe  youth  fretting  in  the  high  fever  of 
an  unhopeful  love,  Keats  has  had  to  pay  the  penalty 
of  genius  in  the  loss  of  posthumous  privacy  for  the  most 
sacred  and  secret  of  his  emotions.  He  thought  his 
name  would  be  forgotten,  but  posterity  in  an  excess  of 
remembrance  has  suffered  no  corner  of  his  soul  to  escape 
the  searchlight.  Once  preserved  and  printed,  these 
love-letters  of  his  cannot  be  ignored.  Unselfish  through 
and  through,  and  naturally  well-conditioned  in  all 
thoughts  and  feelings  over  which  he  had  control,  he 
strives  hard  in  them  to  keep  to  a  vein  of  considerate 
tenderness,  and  the  earlier  letters  of  the  series  contain 
charming  passages.  But  often,  more  often  indeed 
than  not  even  from  the  first,  they  show  him  a  prey, 
despite  his  best  efforts  to  master  himself  and  be  reason- 
able, to  an  uncontrollable  intensity  and  fretfulness  of 
passion.  Now  that  experience  of  love  had  come  to  him, 
it  belied  instead  of  confirming  the  view  he  had  expressed 
in  Isabella  that  too  much  pity  has  been  spent  on  the 
sorrows  of  lovers,  and  that 

— ^for  the  general  award  of  love 
The  little  sweet  doth  kill  much  bitterness. 

In  his  own  passion  there  was  from  the  first,  and  in- 
creasingly as  time  went  on,  at  least  as  much  of  bitter- 
ness as  of  sweet.  An  enraptured  but  an  untrustful 
lover,  alternately  rejoicing  and  chafing  at  his  bondage 
and  passing  through  a  hundred  conflicting  extremes  of 
feeling  in  an  hour,  he  finds  in  the  fever  of  work  and 
composition  his  only  antidote  against  the  fever  ^f  his 
love-sickness.  This  is  written  soon  after  his  arrival  at 
Shanklin : — 

I  am  glad  I  had  not  an  opportunity  of  sending  off  a  Letter 
which  I  wrote  for  you  on  Tuesday  night — 'twas  too  much  like 


KEATS  AS  LOVER  .%1 

one  out  of  Rousseau^s  Heloise.  I  am  more  reasonable  this 
morning.  The  morning  is  the  only  proper  time  for  me  to  write 
to  a  beautiful  Girl  whom  I  love  so  much:  for  at  night,  when 
the  lonely  day  has  closed,  and  the  lonely,  silent,  unmusical 
Chamber  is  waiting  to  receive  me  as  into  a  Sepulchre,  then 
believe  me  my  passion  gets  entirely  the  sway,  then  I  would 
not  have  you  see  those  Rhapsodies  which  I  once  thought  it 
impossible  I  should  ever  give  way  to,  and  which  I  have  often 
laughed  at  in  another,  for  fear  you  should  think  me  either  too 
unhappy  or  perhaps  a  little  mad.  I  am  now  at  a  very  pleasant 
Cottage  window,  looking  onto  a  beautiful  hilly  country,  with  a 
glimpse  of  the  sea;  the  morning  is  very  fine.  I  do  not  know 
how  elastic  my  spirit  might  be,  what  pleasure  I  might  have 
in  living  here  and  breathing  and  wandering  as  free  as  a  stag 
about  this  beautiful  Coast  if  the  remembrance  of  you  did  not 
weigh  so  upon  me.  I  have  never  known  any  unalloy'd  Happi- 
ness for  many  days  together:  the  death  or  sickness  of  some 
one  has  always  spoilt  my  hours — and  now  when  none  such 
troubles  oppress  me,  it  is  you  must  confess  very  hard  that  another 
sort  of  pain  should  haunt  me.  Ask  yourself  my  love  whether 
you  are  not  very  cruel  to  have  so  entrammelled  me,  so  destroyed 
my  freedom. 

A  fortnight  later  he  manages  to  write  a  little  more  at 
ease  of  himself,  his  moods,  and  his  doings: — 


Do  not  call  it  folly,  when  I  tell  you  I  took  your  letter  last 
night  to  bed  with  me.  In  the  morning  I  found  your  name  on 
the  sealing  wax  obliterated.  I  was  startled  at  the  bad  omen 
till  I  recollected  that  it  must  have  happened  in  my  dreams, 
and  they  know  you  fall  out  by  contraries.  You  must  have  found 
out  by  this  time  I  am  a  little  given  to  bode  ill  like  the  raven; 
it  is  my  misfortune  not  my  fault;  it  has  proceeded  from  the 
general  tenor  of  the  circumstances  of  my  life,  and  rendered 
every  event  suspicious.  However  I  will  no  more  trouble  either 
you  or  myself  with  sad  Prophecies;  though  so  far  I  am  pleased 
at  it  as  it  has  given  me  opportunity  to  love  your  disinterested- 
ness towards  me.  I  cannot  say  when  I  shall  get  a  volume  ready. 
I  have  three  or  four  stories  half  done,  but  as  I  cannot  write  for 
the  mere  sake  of  the  press,  I  am  obliged  to  let  them  progress 
or  lie  still  as  my  fancy  chooses.  By  Christmas  perhaps  they 
may  appear,  but  I  am  not  yet  sure  they  ever  will.  'Twill  be 
no  matter,  for  Poems  are  as  common  as  newspapers  and  I  do 
not  see  why  it  is  a  greater  crime  in  me  than  in  another  to  let 
the  verses  of  an  half-fledged  brain  tumble  into  the  reading-rooms 


362  AN  IMAGINED  FUTURE 

and  drawing-room  windows.  .  .  .  To-morrow  I  shall,  if  my  health 
continues  to  improve  during  the  night,  take  a  look  farther  about 
the  country,  and  spy  at  the  parties  about  here  who  come  hunting 
after  the  picturesque  like  beagles.  It  is  astonishing  how  they 
raven  down  scenery  like  children  do  sweetmeats.  The  wondrous 
Chine  here  is  a  very  great  Lion:  I  wish  I  had  as  many  guineas 
as  there  have  been  spy-glasses  in  it. 

Yet  another  fortnight,  and  we  find  him  uttering  aloud 
the  same  yearning  to  attain  the  double  goal  of  love 
and  death  together  as  he  had  often  uttered  to  himself 
in  secret  since  he  came  imder  the  spell.  On  another 
day,  letting  his  imagination  comply  with  the  longing 
for  Alpine  travel  and  seclusion  which  since  Rousseau 
had  been  one  of  the  romantic  fashions  of  the  time,  he 
draws  her  a  picture  of  an  imagined  future  for  herself 
and  him  which,  judging  at  least  by  her  choice  of 
pleasures  until  now,  would  ill  have  stood  the  test  of 
reality: — 

You  would  delight  very  greatly  in  the  walks  about  here;  the 
CKffs,  woods,  hills,  sands,  rocks,  etc.,  about  here.  They  are 
however  not  so  fine  but  I  shall  give  them  a  hearty  goodbye  to 
exchange  them  for  my  Cathedral. — ^Yet  again  I  am  not  so 
tired  of  Scenery  as  to  hate  Switzerland.  We  might  spend  a 
pleasant  year  at  Berne  or  Zurich — if  it  should  please  Venus 
to  hear  my  'Beseech  thee  to  hear  us  O  Goddess.'  And  if  she 
should  hear,  God  forbid  we  should  what  people  call,  settle — turn 
into  a  pond,  a  stagnant  Lethe — a  vile  crescent,  row  or  buildings. 
Better  be  imprudent  moveables  than  prudent  fixtures.  Open  my 
Mouth  at  the  Street  door  like  the  Lion's  head  at  Venice  to  receive 
hateful  cards,  letters,  messages.  Go  out  and  wither  at  tea 
parties;  freeze  at  dinners;  bake  at  dances;  simmer  at  routs. 
No  my  love,  trust  yourself  to  me  and  I  will  find  you  nobler 
amusements,  fortune  favouring. 

The  most  sanely  self-revealing  and  pleasant  passages 
in  the  correspondence  occur  in  a  letter  written  in  the 
second  week  after  Keats  and  Brown  had  settled  at 
Winchester: — 

I  see  you  through  a  Mist:  as  I  daresay  you  do  me  by  this 
time.  Believe  me  in  the  first  Letters  I  wrote  you:  I  assure 
you  I  felt  as  I  wrote — I  could  not  write  so  now.  The  thousand 
images  I  have  had  pass  through  my  brain — my  uneasy  spirits — 


CHANGE  TO  WINCHESTER  363 

my  unguess'd  fate — all  spread  as  a  veil  between  me  and  you. 
Remember  I  have  had  no  idle  leisure  to  brood  over  you — *tis  well 
perhaps  I  have  not.  I  could  not  have  endured  the  throng  of 
jealousies  that  used  to  haunt  me  before  I  had  plunged  so  deeply 
into  imaginary  interests.  I  would  fain,  as  my  sails  are  set,  sail 
on  without  an  interruption  for  a  Brace  of  Months  longer — I  am 
in  complete  cue — in  the  fever;  and  shall  in  these  four  Months 
do  an  immense  deal.  This  Page  as  my  eye  skims  over  it  I  see 
is  excessively  unloverlike  and  ungallant — I  cannot  help  it — I  am 
no  officer  in  yawning  quarters;  no  Parson-romeo.  .  .  .  'Tis  harsh, 
harsh,  I  know  it.  My  heart  seems  now  made  of  iron — I  could  not 
write  a  proper  answer  to  an  invitation  to  Idalia.  .  .  .  This  Win- 
chester is  a  fine  place:  a  beautiful  Cathedral  and  many  other 
ancient  buildings  in  the  Environs.  The  little  coffin  of  a  room  at 
Shanklin  is  changed  for  a  large  room,  where  I  can  promenade  at 
my  pleasure.  .  .  .  One  of  the  pleasantest  things  I  have  seen  lately 
was  at  Cowes.  The  Regent  in  his  Yatch  (I  think  they  spell  it) 
was  anchored  opposite — a  beautiful  vessel — and  all  the  Yatchs 
and  boats  on  the  coast  were  passing  and  repassing  it;  and 
circuiting  and  tacking  about  it  in  every  direction — I  never 
beheld  anything  so  silent,  light,  and  graceful. — As  we  passed 
over  to  Southampton,  there  was  nearly  an  accident.  There 
came  by  a  Boat,  well  mann'd,  with  two  naval  officers  at  the 
stern.  Our  Bow-lines  took  the  top  of  their  little  mast  and  snapped 
if  off  close  by  the  board.  Had  the  mast  been  a  little  stouter 
they  would  have  been  upset.  In  so  trifling  an  event  I  could 
not  help  admiring  our  seamen — neither  officer  nor  man  in  the 
whole  Boat  mov'd  a  muscle — they  scarcely  noticed  it  even  with 
words.  Forgive  me  for  this  flint-worded  Letter,  and  believe  and 
see  that  I  cannot  think  of  you  without  some  sort  of  energy — 
though  mal  a  propos.  Even  as  I  leave  off  it  seems  to  me  that  a 
few  more  moments*  thought  of  you  would  uncrystallize  and 
dissolve  me.  I  must  not  give  way  to  it — but  turn  to  my  writing 
again — if  I  fail  I  shall  die  hard.  O  my  love,  your  lips  are  growing 
sweet  again  to  my  fancy — ^I  must  forget  them. 


The  old  cathedral  city  of  Winchester,  with  its  peaceful 
closes  breathing  antiquity,  its  hiurying  limpid  chalk- 
streams  and  beautiful  elm-shadowed  meadow  walks, 
and  the  tonic  climate  of  its  siu-rounding  downs,  'where 
the  air,'  he  writes,  'is  worth  sixpence  a  pint,'  exactly 
suited  Keats,  and  he  quickly  improved  both  in  health 
and  spirits.  The  days  he  spent  here,  from  the  middle  of 
August  to  the  second  week  of  October,  were  the  last 


364  WORK  AND  FINE  WEATHER 

good  days  of  his  life.  Working  with  a  steady  intensity 
of  appHcation,  he  managed,  as  the  last  extract  shows, 
to  steel  himself  for  the  time  being  against  the  impor- 
timity  of  his  passion,  although  never  without  a  certain 
feverishness  in  the  effort,  and  to  keep  the  thought  of 
money  troubles  at  bay  by  buoying  himself  up  with  the 
firm  hope  of  a  stage  success.  His  work  continued  to 
be  chiefly  on  Lamia,  with  the  concluding  part  of  Otho, 
and  the  beginning  of  a  new  tragedy  on  the  story  of 
King  Stephen.  In  the  last  act  of  Otho  and  the  opening 
scenes  (which  are  all  he  did)  of  King  Stephen  he  laboured 
alone,  without  accepting  help  from  Brown.  On  the 
25th  of  August  he  writes  to  Reynolds,  as  usual  more 
gravely  and  openly  than  to  any  other  correspondent, 
of  his  present  feelings  in  regard  to  life  and  literature. 

The  more  I  know  what  my  diligence  may  in  time  probably 
effect,  the  more  does  my  heart  distend  with  Pride  and  Obstinacy^ 
— I  feel  it  in  my  power  to  become  a  popular  writer — I  feel  it  in 
my  power  to  refuse  the  poisonous  suffrage  of  a  public.  My  own 
being  which  I  know  to  be  becomes  of  more  consequence  to  me 
than  the  crowds  of  Shadows  in  the  shape  of  men  and  women 
that  inhabit  a  kingdom.  The  soul  is  a  world  of  itself,  and  has 
enough  to  do  in  its  own  home.  Those  whom  I  know  already, 
and  who  have  grown  as  it  were  a  part  of  myself,  I  could  not  do 
without:  but  for  the  rest  of  mankind,  they  are  as  much  a  dream 
to  me  as  Milton's  Hierarchies.  I  think  if  I  had  a  free  and  healthy 
and  lasting  organization  of  heart,  and  lungs  as  strong  as  an  ox's, 
so  as  to  be  able  to  bear  unhurt  the  shock  of  extreme  thought  and 
sensation  without  weariness,  I  could  pass  my  life  very  nearly 
alone  though  it  should  last  eighty  years.  But  I  feel  my  body 
too  weak  to  support  me  to  the  height,  I  am  obliged  continually 
to  check  myself,  and  be  nothing. 

A  letter  to  his  young  sister  of  three  days  later  is  in 
quite  another  key,  but  one  of  wholesome  and  unforced 
high  spirits: — 

The  delightful  Weather  we  have  had  for  two  Months  is  the 
highest  gratification   I  could  receive — no  chill'd  red  noses-^-no 

*  — and  now  his  heart 

Distends  with  pride,  and  hardening  in  his  strength 
Glories — .  Milton,  Par.  Lost,  i.  581. 


ILL  NEWS  FROM   GEORGE  365 

shivering — but  fair  atmosphere  to  think  in — a  clean  towel 
marked  with  the  mangle  and  a  basin  of  clear  Water  to  drench 
one's  face  with  ten  times  a  day:  no  need  of  much  exercise — a 
Mile  a  day  being  quite  sufficient.  My  greatest  regret  is  that  I 
have  not  been  well  enough  to  bathe  though  I  have  been  two 
Months  by  the  sea  side  and  live  now  close  to  delicious  bath- 
ing— Still  I  enjoy  the  Weather — I  adore  fine  Weather  as  the 
greatest  blessing  I  can  have.  ...  I  should  like  now  to  promenade 
round  your  Gardens — apple-tasting — pear-tasting — plum-judging 
—  apricot-nibbling  —  peach-scrunching  —  nectarine-sucking  and 
Melon-carving.  I  have  also  a  great  feeling  for  antiquated 
cherries  full  of  sugar  cracks — and  a  white  currant  tree  kept 
for  company.  I  admire  lolling  on  a  lawn  by  a  water  lillied  pond 
to  eat  white  currants  and  see  gold  fish:  and  go  to  the  Fair  in 
the  Evening  if  I'm  good.  There  is  not  hope  for  that — one  is 
sure  to  get  into  some  mess  before  evening. 

A  week  later  (September  5)  he  discourses  pleasantly 
to  Taylor  on  the  virtues  and  drawbacks  of  different 
kinds  of  country  air  and  on  the  effects  of  field  labour 
on  the  character;  and  by  way  of  a  specimen  of  his 
work  sends  a  passage  of  thirty  lines  from  Lamia.  By 
this  time  Brown  had  gone  off  to  visit  friends  at  Bed- 
hampton  and  elsewhere,  and  Keats  was  left  alone  at 
Winchester.  Presently  came  a  disturbing  letter  from 
George,  established  by  this  time  at  the  then  remote 
trading  settlement  of  Louisville,  Ohio,  and  in  difficulties 
from  a  heavy  loss  incurred  through  a  venture  into  which 
he  had  been  led,  dishonestly  as  he  believed,  by  the 
naturalist  Audubon.  He  asks  in  consequence  that 
Abbey  should  be  pressed  to  send  him  the  share  due  to 
him  from  their  brother  Tom's  estate.  This  could  only 
be  done  if  their  aunt  Jennings  could  be  persuaded  to 
free  Abbey's  hands  by  dropping  her  threatened  Chancery 
suit.  Hurrying  to  London  to  try  and  put  this  business 
through,  Keats  stayed  there  three  days  (Septr.  10-13), 
but  dared  not  break  his  serenity  by  sight  or  touch  of 
his  enchantress.  In  a  note  to  her  he  writes,  ^I  love 
you  too  much  to  venture  to  Hampstead,  I  feel  it  is  not 
paying  a  visit,  but  venturing  into  a  fire.  ...  I  am  a 
Coward,  I  cannot  bear  the  pain  of  being  happy,  'tis  out 
of  the  question;  I  must  admit  no  thought  of  it.'    He 


366  A  RUN  TO  TOWN 

found  few  of  his  friends  in  town;  dined  with  the  Wylies, 
the  family  of  his  sister-in-law;  and  had  much  talk  with 
Mr  Abbey,  who  seemed  inclined  to  dangle  before  him 
some  prospect  of  employment  in  the  hatter^s  business 
which  he  combined  with  his  tea-dealing,  and  read  to 
him  with  approval  a  passage  from  Don  Juan  (^Lord 
Byron's  last  flash  poem/  says  Keats)  against  literary 
ambition.  He  went  to  see  his  sister  Fanny  at  Waltham- 
stow,  passed  some  time  with  Rice,  and  had  a  long  six 
hours'  talk  with  Woodhouse:  of  this  Keats's  own 
letters  make  no  mention,  but  Woodhouse's  account  of 
it,  written  a  week  later  to  Taylor,  has  been  preserved 
and  is  curiously  interesting.^ 

Keats,  warm  from  the  composition  of  Lamia,  had 
had  an  impulse  to  pubhsh  it  immediately,  together 
with  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  but  the  publishers  had  thought 
the  time  inopportune.  Woodhouse  asked  why  not 
Isabella  too?  and  Keats  answered  that  he  could  not 
bear  that  poem  now  and  thought  it  mawkish.  Where- 
upon Woodhouse  makes  the  judicious  comment:  Hhis 
certainly  cannot  be  so,  the  feeling  is  very  likely  to  come 
across  an  author  on  review  of  a  former  work  of  his  own, 
particularly  when  the  object  of  his  present  meditations 
is  of  a  more  sober  and  unimpassioned  character.  The 
feeling  of  mawkishness  seems  to  me  that  which  comes 
upon  us  when  anything  of  great  tenderness  and  sim- 
plicity is  met  with  when  we  are  not  in  a  sufficiently 
tender  and  simple  frame  of  mind  to  hear  it:  when  we 
experience  a  sort  of  revulsion  or  resiliency  (if  there  be 
such  a  word)  from  the  sentiment  or  expression.'  Keats, 
full  of  Lamia,  read  it  out  to  his  friend,  who  comments: 
^I  am  much  pleased  with  it.  I  can  use  no  other  terms 
for  you  know  how  badly  he  reads  his  own  poetry.' 
(Other  witnesses  on  the  contrary  tell  of  the  thrilling 
effect  of  Keats's  reading — a  reading  which  was  half 
chanting,  *in  a  low,  tremulous  undertone' — of  his  own 
work.)  ^And  you  know,'  continues  Woodhouse,  'how 
slow  I  am  to  catch  the  effect  of  poetry  read  by  the  best 

1  Morgan  MSS. 


A  TALK  WITH  WOODHOUSE  367 

reader  for  the  first  time/  Nevertheless  he  is  able  to 
give  his  correspondent  a  quite  accurate  sketch  of  the 
plot,  and  adds,  'you  may  suppose  all  these  events 
have  given  K.  scope  for  some  beautiful  poetry,  which 
even  in  this  cursory  hearing  of  it,  came  every  now  and 
then  upon  me  and  made  me  "start,  as  tho'  a  sea-nymph 
quired. " ' 

The  talk  turning  to  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  Keats 
showed  Woodhouse  some  changes  he  had  just  made  in 
recopying  it.  One  of  these  introduced  a  slight  but  dis- 
figuring note  of  cynical  realism  or  'pettish  disgust' 
into  the  concluding  lines  telhng  of  the  deaths  of  old 
Angela  and  the  beadsman,  and  is  the  first  sign  we  find 
of  that  inclination  to  mix  a  worldly  would-be  Don 
Juanish  vein  with  romance  which  was  soon  to  appear 
so  disastrously  in  the  Cap  and  Bells,  The  other  change 
was  to  make  it  clear  that  the  melting  of  Porphyro  into 
Madeline's  dream,  at  the  enchanted  climax  of  the  poem, 
implied  love's  full  fruition  between  them  then  and 
there.  At  this  point  Woodhouse's  prudery  took  alarm. 
He  pleaded  against  the  change  vehemently,  and  Keats 
to  tease  him  still  more  vehemently  defended  it,  vowing 
that  his  own  and  his  hero's  character  for  virility  required 
the  new  reading,  and  that  he  did  not  write  for  misses. 
The  correct  and  excellent  Woodhouse,  scandalized 
though  he  somewhat  was  by  what  he  calls  his  friend's 
'rhodomontade,'  declares  that  they  had  ^  delightful 
time  together.  He  was  leaving  London  the  same  after- 
noon for  Weymouth,  and  Keats  came  to  the  coach- 
ofiice  to  see  him  off.  At  parting  they  each  promised 
to  mend  their  ways  in  the  matter  of  letter-writing, 
Keats  holding  out  the  hope,  which  was  not  fulfilled, 
of  a  rimed  epistle  to  follow.  Woodhouse  tells  how, 
being  the  only  inside  passenger  in  the  coach,  he  '  amused 
himself  by  diving  into  a  deep  reverie,  and  recalling 
all  that  had  passed  during  the  six  hours  we  were  t^te 
a  me.' 

Such  touches  of  over-sensitive  prudery  set  aside,  the 
more  light  we  get  on  this  friend  of  Keats,   Richard 


368  WOODHOUSE  AS  CRITIC 

Woodhouse,  the  higher  grows  our  esteem  both  for  his 
character  and  judgment.  In  other  extant  letters  to 
Taylor  of  this  date,  he  comments  with  fine  insight  on 
Keats's  own  confessions  of  secret  pride  and  obstinacy, 
and  on  his  vice  ('for  a  vice  in  a  poor  man  it  is')  of  lending 
more  than  he  could  afford  to  friends  in  need.  And 
what  can  be  more  sagacious  than  the  following,  from  a 
letter  of  Woodhouse  to  a  lady  cousin  of  his  own? — 


You  were  so  flattered  as  to  say  the  other  day,  you  wished  I 
had  been  in  a  company  where  you  were,  to  defend  Keats. — In 
all  places,  and  at  all  times,  and  before  all  persons,  I  would  express 
and  as  far  as  I  am  able,  support,  my  high  opinion  of  his  poetical 
merits — such  a  genius,  I  verily  believe,  has  not  appeared  since 
Shakespeare  and  Milton.  .  .  .  But  in  our  common  conversation 
upon  his  merits,  we  should  always  bear  in  mind  that  his  fame 
may  be  more  hurt  by  indiscriminate  praise  than  by  wholesale 
censure.  I  would  at  once  admit  that  he  has  great  faults — 
enough  indeed  to  sink  another  writer.  But  they  are  more  than 
counter-balanced  by  his  beauties:  and  this  is  the  proper  mode 
of  appreciating  an  original  genius.  His  faults  will  wear  away — 
his  fire  will  be  chastened — and  then  eyes  will  do  homage  to  his 
brilliancy.  But  genius  is  wayward,  trembling,  easily  daunted. 
And  shall  we  not  excuse  the  errors,  the  luxuriancy  of  youth? 
Are  we  to  expect  that  poets  are  to  be  given  to  the  world,  as  our 
first  parents  were,  in  a  state  of  maturity?  Are  they  to  have  no 
season  of  childhood?  are  they  to  have  no  room  to  try  their 
wings  before  the  steadiness  and  strength  of  their  flight  are  to  be 
finally  judged  of  ?  .  .  .  Now,  while  Keats  is  unknown,  unheeded, 
despised  of  one  of  our  arch-critics,  neglected  by  the  rest — in  the 
teeth  of  the  world,  and  in  the  face  of  'these  curious  days,'  I 
express  my  conviction,  that  Keats,  diu'ing  his  life  (if  it  please 
God  to  spare  him  to  the  usual  age  of  man,  and  the  critics  not  to 
drive  him  from  the  free  air  of  the  Poetic  heaven  before  his  Wings 
are  fully  fledged)  will  rank  on  a  level  with  the  best  of  the  last  or 
of  the  present  generation:  and  after  his  death  will  take  his  place 
at  their  head.  But,  while  I  think  thus,  I  would  make  persons 
respect  my  judgment  by  the  discrimination  of  my  praise,  and  by 
the  freedom  of  my  censure  where  his  writings  are  open  to  it. 
These  are  the  Elements  of  true  criticism.  It  is  easy,  like  Momus, 
to  find  fault  with  the  clattering  of  the  slipper  worn  by  the  God- 
dess of  beauty;  but  *the  serious  Gods'  found  better  employment 
in  admiration  of  her  unapproachable  loveliness.  A  Poet  ought 
to  write  for  Posterity.     But  a  critic  ought  to  do  so  too. 


ALONE  AT  WINCHESTER  369 

By  September  14  Keats  was  back  at  Winchester, 
where  during  the  next  three  weeks  he  had  a  chance  of 
testing  his  capacity  for  soHtude.  He  seems  to  have 
looked  at  Hyperion  again,  but  made  up  his  mind  to  go 
no  farther  with  it,  having  got  to  feel  its  style  too  latinized 
and  Miltonic.  A  very  few  weeks  before,  in  August,  he 
had  written  to  two  different  correspondents  that  Para- 
dise Lost  was  becoming  every  day  a  greater  wonder 
to  him.  Now,  in  the  third  week  of  September  he  had 
come  to  regard  it,  Hhough  so  fine  itself,'  as  a  'corruption 
of  our  language,'  a  case  of  'a  northern  dialect  accom- 
modating itself  to  Greek  and  Latin  inversions  and 
intonations;'  and  had  convinced  himself,  paradoxi- 
cally, that  the  purest  English  was  Chatterton's, — ^which 
is  in  truth  no  right  English  at  all,  but  the  attempt  of 
a  brilhant  self-taught  boy  to  forge  himself  a  fifteenth- 
century  style  by  gathering  miscellaneous  half-understood 
archaisms  out  of  dictionaries  and  stringing  them  in 
fluent  stanzas  of  Spenserian,  or  post-Spenserian,  rhythm 
and  S3nitax.  But  it  was  probably  not  of  Chatterton's 
vocabulary  that  Keats  was  thinking,  but  rather  of  the 
unartificial,  straightforward  flow  of  his  verse  in  contrast 
with  Milton's.  The  apparent  suddenness  of  Keats's 
change  of  mind  on  this  matter  is  characteristic,  like 
his  quite  imjust  return  upon  himself  in  regard  to 
Isabella,  of  what  Haydon  calls  his  lack  of  decisions 
and  fixity  of  aim: — 'One  day  he  was  full  of  an  epic 
poem;  the  next  day  epic  poems  were  splendid  imposi- 
tions on  the  world.  Never  for  two  days  did  he  know 
his  own  intentions.'  By  these  words,  to  be  taken  with 
the  usual  discount,  Haydon  means  the  same  thing  as 
Keats  means  himseK  when  he  speaks  of  his  'imsteady 
and  vagarish  disposition';  let  us  rather  say  his  sensi- 
tive and  receptive  openness  of  mind  to  contradictory 
impressions,  even  on  questions  of  that  art  of  which  he 
had  become  so  fine  a  master,  and  withal  his  habit  of 
complete  surrender  to  whatever  was  the  dominant 
impression  of  the  moment. 

With  reference  to  his  other  occupations  of  the  hour, — 


370    SPIRITED  LETTERS:  TO  HIS  BROTHER 

Lamia  he  had  finished,  and  for  the  present  he  did  no 
more  to  King  Stephen.  ReaHzing  the  low  repute  into 
which  critical  derision  had  brought  him  as  a  member  of 
the  Cockney  School,  he  proposed  to  withhold  his  next 
volume  of  poems  in  hope  that  the  production  of  Otho 
the  Great  at  Drury  Lane  in  the  autumn  might,  if  success- 
ful, create  a  more  favourable  atmosphere  for  its  re- 
ception; and  was  in  consequence  seriously  dashed 
when  he  learnt  that  Kean  was  on  the  point  of  starting 
for  America.  One  of  his  chief  present  pursuits  was 
studying  Italian  in  the  pages  of  Ariosto.  The  whole- 
some brightness  of  an  unusually  fine  season  continuing 
to  sustain  and  soothe  him,  he  wrote  the  last,  most 
unclouded  and  serenely  accomplished  of  his  meditative 
odes,  that  To  Autumn.  A  sudden  return  of  the  epis- 
tolary mood  came  upon  him,  and  between  September 
17th  and  27th  he  poured  himself  out  to  his  brother  and 
sister-in-law  in  a  new  long  journal-letter,  fuU  of  confi- 
dences on  every  subject  that  dwelt  in  or  flitted  through 
his  mind  except  the  one  master-subject  of  the  passion 
he  was  striving  to  keep  subdued  by  absence.  ^I  am 
inclined,'  he  says,  'to  write  a  good  deal;  for  there  can 
be  nothing  so  remembrancing  and  enchaining  as  a  good 
long  letter,  be  it  composed  of  what  it  may.' 

Accordingly  he  ranges  as  usual  over  all  manner  of  mis- 
cellaneous themes,  discussing  his  own  and  his  brother's 
situation  and  future;  telling  of  Haydon  and  his  incon- 
siderate behaviour  about  the  loan,  and  of  Dilke's  political 
dogmatism  and  over-anxiety  about  his  boy;  giving 
accounts  of  the  several  members  of  the  Hampstead  circle, 
mixed  up  with  playful  messages  to  his  sister-in-law,  whom 
he  represents  as  caring  nothing  for  these  tiresome 
people  and  interrupting  her  husband's  reading  of  the 
letter  to  insist  on  prattling  about  her  baby.  He  adds 
anecdotes  of  his  visit  to  her  family  in  London,  and  k 
propos  of  babies  tells  of  a  thing  he  had  heard  Charles 
Lamb  say.  'A  child  in  arms  was  passing  by  his  chair 
toward  its  mother,  in  the  nurse's  arms.  Lamb  took 
hold  of  the  long  clothes,  saying:  "Where,  God  bless 


TO  REYNOLDS,  BROWN,  AND  DILKE    371 

me,  where  does  it  leave  off?"'  With  an  unexpressed 
shaft  of  inward  mockery  at  his  own  pHght,  he  describes 
the  ridiculous  figure  cut  by  a  man  in  love,  the  victim 
in  this  case  being  his  friend  Haslam;  relates  jokes 
practical  and  other  which  had  lately  passed  between 
Brown,  Dilke,  and  himself,  and  after  a  very  sensible 
excursion  into  history  and  current  pohtics,  to  which 
he  was  never  at  all  so  indifferent  as  is  commonly  said, 
he  dwells  with  a  kindly,  humorous  enjoyment  on  the 
sedate  maiden-ladylike  ways  and  aspects  of  the  cathedral 
town  where  he  found  the  autimin  quietude  so  com- 
forting. This  sets  him  thinking  of  his  fragment  of  a 
poem  written  seven  months  earlier  and  breathing  a 
similar  spirit,  the  Eve  of  St  Mark;  so  he  transcribes 
it  for  their  benefit,  and  also,  in  odd  contrast,  a  long 
passage  from  Burton's  Anatomy  which  had  tickled 
some  queer  comer  of  his  brain  by  its  cumulative  effect 
of  exuberant  and  grotesque  disgustfulness,  and  which 
he  declares  he  would  love  to  hear  delivered  by  an  actor 
across  the  footlights. 

During  the  same  days  at  Winchester  Keats  also  wrote 
intimately  and  purposefully  to  Re}Tiolds,  Brown,  and 
Dilke.  In  all  these  letters  we  see  the  well-conditioned, 
wise  and  admirable  Keats,  the  sane  and  healthy  partner 
in  his  so  dual  and  divided  nature,  for  the  time  being 
holding  firmly,  or  at  any  rate  hopeful  and  confident 
of  being  able  to  hold  firmly,  the  upper  hand.  He 
resolves  manfully  to  rally  his  moral  powers,  to  banish 
over-passionate  and  fretful  feelings  and  to  put  himself 
on  a  right  footiag  with  the  world.  Imaginary  troubles, 
he  declares,  are  what  prey  upon  a  man:  real  troubles 
spur  him  to  exertion,  and  exert  himself  and  fight  against 
morbid  unagiriings  he  will.  In  reference  to  George's 
money  troubles,  ^Rest  in  the  confidence,'  he  says, 
Hhat  I  will  not  omit  any  exertion  to  benefit  you  by 
some  means  or  other:  if  I  cannot  remit  you  hundreds, 
I  will  tens,  and  if  not  that,  ones:'  a  promise  which 
we  shall  find  George  taking  only  too  literally  later  on. 
Of  his  brother's  and  his  own  immediate  prospect  he 


372  HOPES  AND  RESOLUTIONS 

writes  with  seriousness,  nevertheless  more  encouragingly 
than  the  occasion  well  warranted.  He  will  not  let 
himself  seem  too  much  depressed  even  by  the  heavy 
check  which  his  and  Brown's  hopes  about  Otho  the  Great 
had  just  received  from  the  news  of  Kean's  intended 
departure  for  America. 

We  are  certainly  in  a  very  low  estate — I  say  we,  for  I  am  in 
such  a  situation,  that  were  it  not  for  the  assistance  of  Brown 
and  Taylor,  I  must  be  as  badly  off  as  a  man  can  be.  I  could 
not  raise  any  sum  by  the  promise  of  any  poem,  no,  not  by  the 
mortgage  of  my  intellect.  We  must  wait  a  little  while.  I 
really  have  hopes  of  success.  I  have  finished  a  tragedy,  which 
if  it  succeeds  will  enable  me  to  sell  what  I  may  have  in  manu- 
script to  a  good  advantage.  I  have  passed  my  time  in  reading, 
writing,  and  fretting,  the  last  I  intend  to  give  up,  and  stick  to 
the  other  two.  They  are  the  only  chances  of  benefit  to  us. 
Your  wants  will  be  a  fresh  spur  to  me.  I  assure  you  you  shall 
more  than  share  what  I  can  get  whilst  I  am  still  young.  The 
time  may  come  when  age  will  make  me  more  selfish.  I  have 
not  been  well  treated  by  the  world,  and  yet  I  have,  capitally 
well.  I  do  not  know  a  person  to  whom  so  many  purse-strings 
would  fly  open  as  to  me,  if  I  could  possibly  take  advantage  of 
them,  which  I  cannot  do,  for  none  of  the  owners  of  these  purses 
are  rich.  .  .  .  Mine,  I  am  sure,  is  a  tolerable  tragedy;  it  would 
have  been  a  bank  to  me,  if  just  as  I  had  finished  it,  I  had  not 
heard  of  Kean's  resolution  to  go  to  America.  That  was  the 
worst  news  I  could  have  had.  .  .  .  But  be  not  cast  down  any 
more  than  I  am;  I  feel  I  can  bear  real  ills  better  than  imaginary 
ones.  Whenever  I  find  myself  growing  vapourish,  I  rouse  myself, 
wash,  and  put  on  a  clean  shirt,  brush  my  hair  and  clothes,  tie 
my  shoestrings  neatly,  and  in  fact  adonize  as  if  I  were  going  out. 
Then,  all  clean  and  comfortable,  I  sit  down  to  write.  This  I 
find  the  greatest  relief. 

And  again,  in  still  better  heart: 

With  my  inconstant  disposition  it  is  no  wonder  that  this 
morning,  amid  all  our  bad  times  and  misfortunes,  I  should  feel 
so  alert  and  well-spirited.  At  this  moment  you  are  perhaps  in 
a  very  different  state  of  mind.  It  is  because  my  hopes  are  ever 
paramount  to  my  despair.  I  have  been  reading  over  a  part  of 
a  short  poem  I  have  composed  lately,  called  Lamia,  and  I  am 
certain  there  is  that  sort  of  fire  in  it  which  must  take  hold  of 
people  in  some  way.  Give  them  either  pleasant  or  unpleasant 
sensation — what  they  want  is  a  sensation  of  some  sort.     I  wish 


WILL  WORK  FOR  THE  PRESS  373 

I  could  pitch  the  key  of  your  spirits  as  high  as  mine  is;  but 
your  organ-loft  is  beyond  the  reach  of  my  voice. 

To  Dilke  and  Brown  he  writes  at  the  same  time  of 
his  own  immediate  plans,  telling  them  that  he  is  deter- 
mined to  give  up  trusting  to  mere  hopes  of  ultimate 
success,  whether  from  plays  or  poems,  and  to  turn  to 
the  natural  resource  of  a  man  fit  for  nothing  but  litera- 
ture and  needing  to  support  himself  by  his  pen;  the 
resource,  that  is,  of  journalism  and  reviewing.  These 
are  some  of  his  words  to  Dilke: — 

Wait  for  the  issue  of  this  Tragedy?  No — there  cannot  be 
greater  uncertainties  east,  west,  north,  and  south  than  concerning 
dramatic  composition.  How  many  months  must  I  wait !  Had  I 
not  better  begin  to  look  about  me  now?  If  better  events  super- 
sede this  necessity  what  harm  will  be  done?  I  have  no  trust 
whatever  on  Poetry.  I  don't  wonder  at  it — the  marvel  is  to 
me  how  people  read  so  much  of  it.  I  think  you  will  see  the 
reasonableness  of  my  plan.  To  forward  it  I  purpose  living  in 
a  cheap  Lodging  in  Town,  that  I  may  be  in  the  reach  of  books 
and  information  of  which  there  is  here  a  plentiful  lack.  If  I 
can  find  any  place  tolerably  comfortable  I  will  settle  myself  and 
fag  till  I  can  afford  to  buy  Pleasure — ^which  if  I  never  can  afford 
I  must  go  without. 

He  had  been  living  since  May  on  an  advance  from 
Taylor  and  a  loan  from  Brown  to  be  repaid  out  of  the 
eventual  profits  of  their  play,  and  was  uneasy  at  putting 
Brown  to  a  present  sacrifice.  He  writes  to  him  ac- 
cordingly:— 

I  have  not  known  yet  what  it  is  to  be  diligent.  I  purpose  living 
in  town  in  a  cheap  lodging,  and  endeavouring,  for  a  beginning, 
to  get  the  theatricals  of  some  paper.  AVhen  I  can  afford  to 
compose  deliberate  poems,  I  will.  ...  I  had  got  into  a  habit  of 
mind  of  looking  towards  you  as  a  help  in  all  difficulties.  You 
will  see  it  as  a  duty  I  owe  myself  to  break  the  neck  of  it.  I  do 
nothing  for  my  subsistence — make  no  exertion.  At  the  end  of 
another  year  you  shall  applaud  me,  not  for  verses,  but  for  conduct. 

Brown,  returning  to  Winchester  a  few  days  later,  found 
his  friend  unshaken  in  the  same  healthy  resolutions, 
and  however  loth  to  lose  him  for  housemate  and  doubtful 
of  his  power  to  live  the  life  he  proposed,  respected  his 


374         ATTEMPT  AND  BREAKDOWN 

motives  too  much  to  contend  against  them.  It  was 
accordingly  settled  that  the  two  friends,  after  travelling 
up  to  London  together,  should  part  company,  Brown 
returning  to  his  home  at  Hampstead,  while  Keats 
went  to  live  by  himself  and  look  out  for  employment 
on  the  press.  The  Dilkes,  who  were  living  in  Great 
Smith  Street,  Westminster,  at  his  desire  engaged  a 
lodging  for  him  close  by,  at  the  corner  of  College  Street 
(no.  25),  and  thither  he  betook  himself,  it  would  seem 
on  the  7th  or  8th  of  October. 

College  Street,  as  all  Londoners  or  visitors  to  London 
know,  is  one  of  sedately  picturesque  Queen  Anne  or 
early  Georgian  houses  overlooking  the  Abbey  gardens. 
No  corner  of  the  town  could  have  been  more  fitted  to 
soothe  him  with  a  sense  of  cathedral  quietude  resembling 
that  which  he  had  just  left.  But  the  wise  and  pur- 
poseful Keats  had  reckoned  without  his  other  self,  the 
Keats  distracted  by  uncontrollable  love-cravings.  His 
blood  proved  traitor  to  his  will,  and  the  plan  of  life  and 
literary  hackwork  in  London  broke  down  at  once  on 
trial,  or  even  before  trial.  On  the  10th  he  went  up  to 
Hampstead,  and  in  a  moment  all  his  strength,  to  borrow 
words  of  his  own,  was  uncrystallized  and  dissolved.  It 
was  the  first  time  he  had  seen  his  mistress  since  June. 
He  found  her  kind,  and  from  that  hour  was  utterly 
passion's  slave  again.  In  the  solitude  of  his  London 
lodging  he  found  that  he  could  not  work  nor  rest  nor 
fix  his  thoughts.    He  writes  to  her  three  days  later: — 

This  moment  I  have  set  myself  to  copy  some  verses  out  fair. 
I  cannot  proceed  with  any  degree  of  content.  I  must  write  you 
a  line  or  two  and  see  if  that  will  assist  in  dismissing  you  from 
my  Mind  foj*  ever  so  short  a  time.  Upon  my  Soul  I  can  think 
of  nothing  else.  The  time  is  passed  when  I  had  power  to  advise 
and  warn  you  [against  the  unpromising  morning  of  my  Life.  My 
love  has  made  me  selfish.  I  cannot  exist  without  you.  I  am 
forgetful  of  everything  but  seeing  you  again — my  Life  seems  to 
stop  there — ^I  see  no  further.     You  have  absorbed  me. 

He  seems  to  have  spent  the  next  week  going  back- 
wards and  forwards  between  Hampstead  and  London, 


RETURN  TO  WENTWORTH  PLACE   375 

staying  for  three  nights  as  a  guest  at  her  mother's 
house  (*my  three  days'  dream/  he  calls  the  visit)  and 
for  one  or  two  at  the  Dilkes'  in  Westminster,  and  finally 
about  the  20th  settling  back  into  his  old  quarters  with 
Brown  at  Wentworth  Place  next  door  to  her.  '  I  shall  be 
able  to  do  nothing/  he  writes, — and  again  there  comes 
the  cry,  'I  should  like  to  cast  the  die  for  Love  or  death.' 

It  was  for  death  that  the  die  was  cast,  and  three 
months  later  came  the  seizure  which  made  manifest 
the  certainty  of  the  issue.  In  the  meantime  he  lived 
outwardly  through  the  autumn  and  early  winter  much 
the  same  life  as  before  among  his  own  friends  and 
Brown's.  Some  of  them  noticed  in  him  at  times  a 
loss  of  natural  gaiety  and  an  unaccustomed  strain  of 
recklessness  and  moodiness.  Severn,  who  had  spent  with 
him  part  of  one  of  his  days  at  the  College  Street  lodgings, 
hearing  him  read  Lamia  and  tell  of  the  change  of  mind 
about  Hyperion  (to  Severn  as  an  ardent  Miltonian  a 
sore  disappointment),  called  there  again  a  few  days 
later  only  to  find  him  flown;  and  going  to  see  him  the 
next  Sunday  at  Hampstead  was  perturbed  by  the 
change  in  him.  'He  seemed  well  neither  in  mind  nor 
in  body,  with  little  of  the  happy  confidence  and  resolute 
bearing  of  a  week  earlier:  while  alternating  moods  of 
apathetic  dejection  and  spasmodic  gaiety  rendered  him 
a  companion  somewhat  difficult  to  humour.'  His  corre- 
spondence at  the  same  time  falls  off,  and  from  mid- 
October  until  past  Christmas  we  get  only  one  letter  to 
Severn,  one  to  Rice,  one  to  Taylor  the  publisher,  and 
three  or  four  to  his  sister  Fanny.  For  other  evidence 
we  have  the  recollections,  fairly  full  but  somewhat 
enigmatical  withal,  of  his  housemate  Brown;  some 
blatancies,  little  to  be  trusted,  of  Haydon;  and  what 
is  more  revealing,  the  tenor  of  his  own  attempts  at 
new  poetical  work,  as  well  as  a  few  private  utterances 
in  verse  which  the  stress  of  passion  forced  from  him. 

For  some  weeks  he  was  able  to  ply  at  Wentworth 
Place  a  double  daily  task:  one,  that  of  writing  each 
morning  in  the  same  sitting-room  with  Brown,   who 


376       MORNING  AND  EVENING  TASKS 

copied  as  he  wrote,  some  stanzas  of  a  comic  fairy  poem 
which  they  had  devised  together,  to  be  called  The  Cap 
and  Bells,  or  The  Jealousies,  and  to  come  out  mider  the 
pseudonym  of  'Lucy  Vaughan  Lloyd ^  the  other, 
carried  on  each  evening  in  the  seclusion  of  his  own 
room,  that  of  remodelling  Hyperion  into  the_fonnof 
aJDreain_orVision^^  which  parts  of  the  poem  as  Begun 
a  year  before  should  be  incorporated  with  certain 
changes  of  style  and  diction.  At  the  former  scheme 
Keats  worked  with  great  fluency  but  little  felicity: 
the  mere,  almost  mechanical  act  of  spinning  the  verses 
of  The  Cap  and  Bells  seems  to  have  come  all  the  easier 
to  him  in  that  they  sprang  from  no  vital  or  inward 
part  of  his  imaginative  being,  and  the  result  is  as  nearly 
worthless  as  anything  written  by  such  a  man  can  be 
conceived  to  be.  In  his  solitary  work  on  the  recast 
of  Hyperion  Keats  wrote,  on  the  other  hand,  out  of 
the  truest — ^which  had  come,  alas!  also  to  be  the 
saddest — depths  of  himself;  and  the  fragment  needs 
to  be  studied  with  as  much  care  as  the  best  of  his. earlier 
work  by  those  who  would  understand  the  ripening 
thoughts  of  this  great,  now  stricken,  spirit  on  the 
destinies  of  poets  and  the  relation  of  poetry  to  human 
life.  To  that  study  we  shall  come  by  and  by.  For  the 
present  let  it  be  only  noted  that  these  twofold  occupa- 
tions seem  to  have  been  kept  up  by  Keats  through 
November,  and  broken  off  soon  afterwards  'owing  to 
a  circumstance  which,'  says  Brown,  mysteriously,  'it 
is  needless  to  mention.'  But  judging  by  the  rest  of 
Brown's  narrative,  as  well  as  by  some  of  Keats's  own 
private  outpourings,  no  special  or  external  circumstance 
can  have  been  needed, — ^his  inward  sufferings  were 
quite  enough  of  themselves, — to  put  a  stop  to  his  writing. 
The  wasting  of  his  vital  powers  by  latent  disease  was 
turning  all  his  sensations  and  emotions  into  pain:  at 
once  darkening  the  shadow  of  impending  poverty,  in- 
creasing the  natural  importunity  of  ill-boding  instincts 
at  his  heart,  and  exasperating  into  agony  the  unsatisfied 
cravings  of  his  passion.     During  his  'three  days'  dream' 


CRIES  OF  PASSION  377 

under  the  same  roof  with  his  betrothed  in  October  he 
had  been  able  to  write  peaceably  at  nightfall: — 

Faded  the  flower  and  all  its  budded  charms, 

Faded  the  sight  of  beauty  from  my  eyes, 
Faded  the  shape  of  beauty  from  my  arms, 

Faded  the  voice,  warmth,  whiteness,  paradise — 
Vanish' d  unseasonably  at  shut  of  eve, 

When  the  dusk  holiday — or  holinight 
Of  fragrant-curtain' d  love  begins  to  weave 

The  woof  of  darkness  thick,  for  hid  delight; 
But,  as  I've  read  love's  missal  through  to-day. 
He'll  let  me  sleep,  seeing  I  fast  and  pray. 

But  now  the  hunger  is  uncontrollable: — 

Yourself — ^your  soul — in  pity  give  me  all, 

Withold  no  atom's  atom  or  I  die. 
Or  living  on  perhaps,  your  wretched  thrall. 

Forget,  in  the  mist  of  idle  misery, 
Life's  purposes, — the  palate  of  my  mind 
Losing  its  gust,  and  my  ambition  blind ! 

And  again  he  cries,  what  can  he  do  to  recover  his  old 
liberty?— 

When  every  fair  one  that  I  saw  was  fair. 

Enough  to  catch  me  in  but  half  a  snare. 

Not  keep  me  there: 

When,  howe'er  poor  or  particolour'd  things. 

My  muse  had  wings. 

And  ever  ready  was  to  take  her  course 

Whither  I  bent  her  force, 

Unintellectual,  yet  divine  to  me; — 

Divine,  I  say  ! — What  sea-bird  o'er  the  sea 

Is  a  philosopher  the  while  he  goes 

Winging  along  where  the  great  water  throes  ? 

How  shall  I  do 

To  get  anew 
Those  moulted  feathers,  and  so  mount  once  more 

Above,  above 

The  reach  of  fluttering  Love, 
And  make  him  cower  lowly  while  I  soar  ? 
Shall  I  gulp  wine  ?    No,  that  is  vulgarism, 
A  heresy  and  schism. 

Foisted  into  the  canon  law  of  love; — 


378  SIGNS  OF  DESPONDENCY 

No, — wine  is  only  sweet  to  happy  men; 

More  dismal  cares 

Seize  on  me  unawares, — 
Where  shall  I  learn  to  get  my  peace  again  ? 
To  banish  thoughts  of  that  most  hateful  land, 
Dungeoner  of  my  friends,  that  wicked  strand 
Where  they  were  wreck'd  and  live  a  wrecked  life;    ^ 
That  monstrous  region,  whose  dull  rivers  pour. 
Ever  from  their  sordid  urns  unto  the  shore, 
Unown'd  of  any  weedy-haired  gods. 
Whose  winds,  all  zephyrless,  hold  scourging  rods, 
Ic'd  in  the  great  lakes,  to  afflict  mankind; 
Whose  rank-grown  forests,  frosted,  black,  and  blind. 
Would  fright  a  Dryad;  whose  harsh  herbag'd  meads 
Make  lean  and  lank  the  starved  ox  while  he  feeds; 
There  bad  flowers  have  no  scent,  birds  no  sweet  song, 
And  great  unerring  Nature  once  seems  wrong. 

With  that  image  of  the  sea-bird  winging  untroubled 
its  chosen  way  over  the  waves,  and  as  free  as  they,  the 
poet  sheds  a  real  light  on  his  own  psychology  in  happier 
days,  while  the  later  lines  figure  direfuUy  the  obsession 
that  now  seems  to  make  him  think  of  even  his  friend- 
ships as  wrecked  and  darkened,  and  of  love  as  a  ghastly 
error  in  nature,  no  joy  but  a  scourge  that  blights  and 
devastates.  That  he  might  win  peace  by  marriage 
with  the  object  of  his  passion  does  not  seem  to  have 
occurred  to  Keats  as  possible  at  the  present  ebb-tide 
of  his  fortune.  'However  selfishly  I  feel,'  he  had 
written  to  her  some  months  earHer,  'I  am  sure  I  could 
never  act  selfishly.'  The  Brawnes  on  their  part  were 
comfortably  off,  but  what  his  instincts  of  honour  and 
independence  forbade  him  to  ask,  hers  of  tenderness 
could  perhaps  hardly  be  expected  to  offer.  As  the 
autumn  wore  into  winter,  he  was  not  able  to  disguise 
his  plight  from  his  affectionate  companion  Brown, 
though  he  shrank  from  speaking  of  its  causes.  Looking 
back  upon  the  time  after  ten  years  Brown  records  the 
impression  it  left  upon  him  thus: — 

It  was  evident  from  the  letters  he  had  sent  me,  even  in  his 
self -deceived  assurance  that  he  was  *as  far  from  being  unhappy 
as  possible,'  that  he  was  unhappy.     I  quickly  perceived  he  was 


TESTIMONY  OF  BROWN  379 

more  so  than  I  had  feared;  his  abstraction,  his  occasional 
lassitude  of  mind,  and,  frequently,  his  assumed  tranquillity  of 
countenance  gave  me  great  uneasiness.  He  was  unwilling  to 
speak  on  the  subject;  and  I  could  do  no  more  than  attempt,  in- 
directly, to  cheer  him  with  hope,  avoiding  that  word  however. 

Brown  then  tells  of  his  morning  and  evening  work  on 
The  Cap  and  Bells  and  the  revised  Hyperion  and,  in 
the  vague  terms  I  have  quoted,  of  its  cessation.  And 
then,  seeming  to  assign  to  money  troubles  an  even  greater 
part  than  they  really  bore  in  causing  Keats's  distress 
of  mind,  Brown  goes  on — 

He  could  not  resume  his  employment,  and  he  became  dreadfully 
unhappy.  His  hopes  of  fame,  and  other  more  tender  hopes 
were  blighted.  His  patrimony,  though  much  consumed  in  a 
profession  he  was  compelled  to  relinquish,  might  have  upheld 
him  through  the  storm,  had  he  not  imprudently  lost  a  part  of 
it  in  generous  loans.  .  .  .  He  possessed  the  noble  virtues  of 
friendship  and  generosity  to  excess;  and  they,  in  this  world, 
may  chance  to  spoil  a  man  of  independent  feeling,  till  he  is 
destitute.  Even  the  *  immediate  cash,*  of  which  he  spoke  in 
the  extracts  I  have  given  from  his  letters,  was  lent,  with  no 
hope  of  its  speedy  repayment,  and  he  was  left  worse  than  penny- 
less.  All  that  a  friend  could  say,  or  offer,  or  urge  was  not  enough 
to  heal  his  many  wounds.  He  listened,  and,  in  kindness,  or 
soothed  by  kindness,  showed  tranquillity,  but  nothing  from  a 
friend  could  relieve  him,  except  on  a  matter  of  inferior  trouble. 
He  was  too  thoughtful,  or  too  unquiet;  and  he  began  to  be 
reckless  of  health.  Among  other  proofs  of  recklessness,  he  was 
secretly  taking,  at  times,  a  few  drops  of  laudanum  to  keep  up 
his  spirits.  It  was  discovered  by  accident,  and,  without  delay, 
revealed  to  me.  He  needed  not  to  be  warned  of  the  danger  of 
such  a  habit;  but  I  rejoiced  at  his  promise  never  to  take  another 
drop  without  my  knowledge;  for  nothing  could  induce  him  to 
break  his  word,  when  once  given, — ^which  was  a  difficulty.  Still, 
at  the  very  moment  of  my  being  rejoiced,  this  was  an  additional 
proof  of  his  rooted  misery. 

Where  Brown  hints  of  his  being  'careless  of  health,' 
Haydon,  referring  apparently  to  this  time  of  his  life 
in  particular,  declares  roundly  and  crudely  as  follows: — 

Unable  to  bear  the  sneers  of  ignorance  or  the  attacks  of  envy, 
not  having  strength  of  mind  enough  to  buckle  himself  together 
like  a  porcupine,  and  present  nothing  but  his  prickles  to  his 


380  HAYDON'S  EXAGGERATIONS 

enemies,  he  began  to  despond,  and  flew  to  dissipation  ac  a  relief, 
which  after  a  temporary  elevation  of  spirits  plunged  him  into 
deeper  despondency  than  ever.  For  six  weeks  he  was  scarcely 
sober,  and — to  show  what  a  man  does  to  gratify  his  appetites, 
when  once  they  get  the  better  of  him — once  covered  his  tongue 
and  throat  as  far  as  he  could  reach  with  cayenne  'pepper,  in 
order  to  appreciate  the  *  delicious  coldness  of  claret  in  all  its 
glory,' — ^his  own  expression. 

If  Keats  really  told  Haydon  that  silly,  and  I  should 
suppose  impossible,  story  about  the  claret  and  cayenne 
it  was  probably  only  a  piece  of  such  'rhodomontade'  as 
his  friends  describe,  invented  on  the  spur  of  the  moment 
to  scandalise  Haydon  or  under  the  provocation  of  one  of 
his  preachments.  That  he  may  at  moments  during 
these  unhappy  months  have  sought  relief  in  dissipation 
of  one  kind  or  another,  as  Brown  tells  us  he  did  in 
drug-taking,  is  likely:  that  he  was  now  or  at  any  time 
habitually  given  to  drink  is  disproved  by  the  explicit 
testimony  of  all  his  friends  as  well  as  of  Brown,  his 
closest  intimate.  In  his  few  letters,  of  the  time  his 
secret  misery  is  betrayed  only  by  a  single  phrase.  Early 
in  December  he  writes  arranging  to  go  with  Severn  to 
see  the  picture  with  which  Severn  was  competing  for, 
and  eventually  won,  the  annual  gold  medal  of  the 
Academy  for  historical  painting.  The  subject  was 
^The  Cave  of  Despair'  from  Spenser.  Keats  in  making 
the  appointment  adds  parenthetically  from  his  troubled 
heart,  'you  had  best  put  me  into  your  Cave  of  Despair.' 
A  little  later  we  hear  of  him  flinging  out  in  a  fit  of 
angered  loyalty  from  a  company  of  elder  artists,  Hilton, 
De  Wint  and  others,  where  the  deserts  of  the  winner 
were  disparaged  and  his  success  put  down  to  favouritism. 
It  would  seem  that  as  late  as  November  17th  he  was 
still,  or  had  quite  lately  been,  going  on  with  The  Cap 
and  Bells.  He  writes  on  that  date  to  Taylor  depreci- 
ating what  he  has  recently  been  about  and  indicating 
in  what  direction  his  thoughts,  when  he  could  bend 
them  seriously  upon  work  at  all,  were  inclined  to  turn: — 

As  the  marvellous  is  the  most  enticing  aind  the  surest  guarantee 
of  harmonious  numbers  I  have  been  endeavouring  to  persuade 


SCHEMES  AND  DOINGS  381 

myself  to  untether  Fancy  and  to  let  her  manage  for  herself.  I 
and  myself  cannot  agree  about  this  at  all.  Wonders  are  no 
wonders  to  me.  I  am  more  at  hom^  amongst  Men  and  women. 
I  would  rather  read  Chaucer  than  Ariosto.  The  little  dramatic 
skill  I  may  as  yet  have  however  badly  it  might  show  in  a 
Drama  would  I  think  be  sufficient  for  a  Poem.  I  wish  to 
diffuse  the  colouring  of  St  Agnes  eve  throughout  a  poem  in 
which  Character  and  Sentiment  would  be  the  figures  to  such 
drapery.  Two  or  three  such  Poems,  if  God  should  spare  me, 
written  in  the  course  of  the  next  six  years,  would  be  a  famous 
gradus  ad  Parnassum  altissimum.  I  mean  they  would  nerve  me 
up  to  the  writing  of  a  few  fine  Plays — my  greatest  ambition — 
when  I  do  feel  ambitious.  I  am  sorry  to  say  that  is  very  seldom. 
The  subject  we  have  once  or  twice  talked  of  appears  a  promising 
one.  The  Earl  of  Leicester's  history.  I  am  this  morning  reading 
Holingshed's  Elizabeth. 

It  does  not  seem  clear  whether  his  idea  about  Leicester 
was  to  use  the  subject  for  a  narrative  poem  or  for  a 
play.  Scott's  Kenilworth,  be  it  remembered,  had  not 
yet  been  written. 

In  December  he  writes  to  his  sister  Fanny  of  the 
trouble  his  throat  keeps  giving  him  or  threatening  him 
with  on  exertion  or  cold,  and  says  that  he  has  been 
ordering  a  thick  greatcoat  and  thick  shoes  on  the 
advice  of  his  doctor.  He  also  mentions  that  he  has 
begun  to  prepare  a  volume  of  poems  to  come  out  in  the 
spring,  and  that  he  is  touching  up  his  and  Brown's 
tragedy  in  order  to  brighten  its  interest.  It  had  been 
accepted,  he  tells  her,  by  Drury  Lane,  but  only  with 
the  promise  of  coming  out  next  season,  and  as  that 
is  not  soon  enough  they  intend  either  to  insist  on  its 
being  brought  out  this  season  or  else  to  transfer  it  to 
Covent  Gardens.  He  has  been  anxiously  expecting, 
and  has  just  now  received,  news  of  George;  and  has 
promised  to  dine  with  Mrs  Dilke  in  London  on  Christmas 
day.  Whether  he  was  able  to  keep  this  engagement 
we  do  not  learn;  but  BrowTi  at  any  rate  was  there,  and 
between  him  and  Dilke  there  arose  a  challenge  on  which 
Keats  among  others  was  called  to  adjudicate.  The 
conversation,  writes  Mrs  Dilke,  Hurned  on  fairy  tales — 
Brown's   forte — Dilke    not    liking    them.    Brown    said 


382  VISIT  OF  GEORGE  KEATS 

he  was  sure  he  could  beat  Dilke,  and  to  let  him  try 
they  betted  a  beefsteak  supper,  and  an  allotted  time 
was  given.  They  had  been  read  by  the  persons  fixed 
on — ^Keats,  Reynolds,  Rice,  and  Taylor — and  the  wager 
was  decided  the  night  before  last  in  favour  of  Dilke. 
Next  Saturday  night  the  supper  is  to  be  given, — 
Beefsteaks  and  punch — the  food  of  the  "Cockney 
School/' ' 

So  life  went  on  for  the  friends,  on  the  surface,  pretty 
much  as  usual,  into  the  new  year  (1820).  Early  in 
January  George  Keats  came  for  a  short  visit  to  England 
to  try  and  advance  his  affairs  and  get  possession  of 
more  capital  for  his  business.  He  seems  not  to  have 
realised  at  all  fully  the  true  state  of  his  brother's  health 
or  heart.  He  noticed,  indeed,  a  change,  and  looking 
back  on  the  time  some  years  afterwards  wi'ites,  'he  was 
not  the  same  being;  although  his  reception  of  me  was 
as  warm  as  heart  could  wish,  he  did  not  speak  with 
former  openness  and  unreserve,  he  had  lost  the  reviving 
custom  of  venting  his  griefs.'  George  was  probably 
too  full  of  his  own  affairs  to  enquire  very  closely  into 
John's,  or  he  would  never  have  allowed  John,  as  he  did, 
to  strip  himself  practically  bare  of  future  means  of 
subsistence  in  fulfilment  of  the  brotherly  promises  of 
help  conveyed,  as  we  have  seen,  in  his  letter  from  Win- 
chester the  previous  September.  'It  was  not  fair  of 
him,  was  it?'  John  is  recorded  to  have  said  a  little 
later  from  his  sick-bed,  referring  to  George's  action  in 
so  taking  him  at  his  word;  and  Brown  from  this 
circumstance  conceived  of  George  a  bitter  bad  opinion 
which  nothing  afterwards  would  shake.  Nevertheless 
there  is  ample  evidence  of  George's  honourable  and 
affectionate  character,  and  it  seems  clear  that  in  striving 
for  commercial  success  he  had  his  brother's  ultimate 
benefit  in  view  as  much  as  his  own,  and  that  in  the 
meantime  he  believed  he  had  reason  to  take  for  granted 
the  willingness  and  ability  of  John's  many  friends  to 
keep  him  afloat. 

On   January    13th,    a   week   after   George's   arrival, 


PLEASANTRY  AND  BITTERNESS         383 

John  took  up  his  pen  to  try  and  write  to  his  sister-in- 
law  a  journal-letter  in  the  old  chatty  affectionate  style. 
If  he  had  the  means,  he  says,  he  would  like  to  come 
and  pay  them  a  visit  in  Ainerica  for  a  few  months. 
^I  should  not  think  much  of  the  time,  or  my  absence 
from  my  books;  or  I  have  no  right  to  think,  for  I  am 
very  idle.  But  then  I  ought  to  be  diligent,  or  at  least 
to  keep  myself  within  reach  of  the  materials  for  diligence. 
Diligence,  that  I  do  not  mean  to  say;  I  should  say 
dreaming  over  my  books,  or  rather  over  other  people's 
books.'  He  gossips  about  friends  and  acquaintances, 
less  good-naturedly  than  usual,  as  he  seems  to  be  aware 
when  he  says,  'any  third  person  would  think  I  was 
addressing  myself  to  a  lover  of  scandal.  But  we  know 
we  do  not  love  scandal,  but  fun;  and  if  scandal  happens 
to  be  fun,  that  is  no  fault  of  ours.'  He  tells  how  George 
is  making  copies  of  his  verses,  including  the  ode  to  the 
Nightingale;  lets  his  inward  embitterment  show  through 
for  an  instant  when  he  says,  'If  you  should  have  a 
boy,  do  not  christen  him  John,  and  persuade  George 
not  to  let  his  partiality  for  me  come  across:  'tis  a  bad 
name,  and  goes  against  a  man';  describes  a  dance  he 
has  been  to  at  the  Dilkes',  and  among  a  good  deal  of 
rather  irritable  and  wry-mouthed  social  satire,  to  which 
he  tries  to  give  a  colour  of  pleasantry  and  playfulness, 
strikes  into  sharp  definition  with  the  fewest  possible 
words  the  characters  of  some  of  his  friends  and 
acquaintances: — 

I  know  three  witty  people,  all  distinct  in  their  excellence — 
Rice,  Reynolds,  and  Richards.  Rice  is  the  wisest,  Reynolds  the 
playfuUest,  Richards  the  out-o*-the-wayest.  The  first  makes  you 
laugh  and  think,  the  second  makes  you  laugh  and  not  think, 
the  third  puzzles  your  head.  I  admire  the  first,  I  enjoy  the 
second,  I  stare  at  the  third.  ...  I  know  three  people  of  no  wit 
at  all,  each  distinct  in  his  excellence — A,  B,  and  C.  A  is  the 
foolishest,  B  the  sulkiest,  C  is  a  negative.  A  makes  you  yawn, 
B  makes  you  hate,  as  for  C  you  never  see  him  at  all  though  he 
were  six  feet  high. — I  bear  the  first,  I  forbear  the  second,  I 
am  not  certain  that  the  third  is.  The  first  is  gruel,  the  second 
ditch-water,  the  third  is  spilt — ^he  ought  to  be  wiped  up. 


384  BEGINNING  OF  THE  END 

This  was  written  on  January  17th.  Ten  days  later 
George  started  on  his  return  journey,  and  John,  having 
forgotten  to  hand  him  for  delivery  at  home  the  budget 
he  had  been  writing,  was  obliged  to  send  it  after  him 
by  post.  A  week  later  again,  on  February  3rd,  came 
the  crash  towards  which,  as  we  can  now  see,  Keats's 
physical  constitution  had  been  hastening  ever  since  the 
overexertion  of  his  Scottish  tour  twenty  months  before. 
The  weather  had  been  very  variable,  almost  sultry  in 
mid-January,  then  bitter  cold  with  frost  and  sleet, 
then  a  thaw,  whereby  Keats  was  tempted  to  leave  off 
his  greatcoat.  Coming  from  London  to  Hampstead 
outside  the  stage  coach  on  the  night  of  Thursday  Feb- 
ruary 3rd.,  the  chill  of  the  thaw  caught  him.  Everyone 
knows  the  words  in  which  Brown  relates  the  sequel: — 

At  eleven  o'clock,  he  came  into  the  house  in  a  state  that  looked 
like  fierce  intoxication.  Such  a  state  in  him,  I  knew,  was 
impossible;  it  therefore  was  the  more  fearful.  I  asked  hurriedly, 
*What  is  the  matter?  you  are  fevered?'  'Yes,  yes,'  he 
answered,  'I  was  on  the  outside  of  the  stage  this  bitter  day  till 
I  was  severely  chilled, — but  now  I  don't  feel  it.  Fevered ! — 
of  course,  a  little.'  He  mildly  and  instantly  yielded,  a  property 
in  his  nature  towards  any  friend,  to  my  request  that  he  should 
go  to  bed.  I  entered  his  chamber  as  he  leapt  into  bed.  On 
entering  the  cold  sheets,  before  his  head  was  on  the  pillow,  he 
slightly  coughed,  and  I  heard  him  say, — 'That  is  blood  from 
my  mouth.'  I  went  towards  him;  he  was  examining  a  single 
drop  of  blood  upon  the  sheet.  'Bring  me  the  candle.  Brown, 
and  let  me  see  this  blood.'  After  regarding  it  steadfastly  he 
looked  up  in  my  face,  with  a  calmness  of  countenance  that  I 
can  never  forget,  and  said, — ^'I  know  the  colour  of  that  blood; 
— it  is  arterial  blood; — ^I  cannot  be  deceived  in  that  colour; — 
that  drop  of  blood  is  my  death-warrant; — I  must  die.'  I  ran 
for  a  surgeon;  my  friend  was  bled;  and,  at  five  in  the  morning, 
I  left  him  after  he  had  been  some  time  in  a  quiet  sleep. 

Keats  lived  for  twelve  months  longer,  but  it  was 
only,  in  his  own  words,  a  life  in  death.  Before  narrating 
the  end,  let  us  pause  and  consider  his  work  of  the  two 
preceding  years,  1818  and  1819,  on  which  his  fame  as 
a  great  English  poet  is  chiefly  founded. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

WORK  OF  1818,   1819.— I.    THE  ACHIEVEMENTS 

Minor  achievements — Bards  of  Passion  and  of  Mirth — Fancy — The  tales — 
Isabella — Story  and  metre — Influence  of  Chaucer — Apostrophes  and 
invocations — Horror  turned  to  beauty — The  digging  scene — Its  quality 
— The  Eve  of  St  Agnes — Variety  of  sources — Boccaccio's  Filocolo — 
Poetic  scope  and  method — Examples — The  unrobing  scene — The  feast 
of  fruits — A  rounded  close — Lamia — Sources:  and  a  comparison — 
Metre  and  quality — Beauties  and  faults — Perplexing  moral — The  sage 
denounced:  why? — Comments  of  Leigh  Hunt — The  odes:  To  Psyche — 
Sources:  Burton  and  Apuleius — QuaUties:  A  questionable  claim — 
On  Indolence — On  a  Grecian  Urn — Sources:  A  composite — Spheres 
of  art  and  Ufe  contrasted — Play  between  the  two  spheres — The 
Nightingale  ode — Ode  on  Melancholy — A  grand  close — The  last  of  the 
odes — To  Autumn. 

The  work  of  Keats's  two  mature  years  (if  any  .poet  or 
man  in  his  twenty-third  and  twenty-fourth  years  can 
be  called  mature)  seems  to  divide  itself  naturally  into 
two  main  groups  or  classes.  One  class  consists  of  his 
finished  achievements,  things  successfully  carried  through 
in  accordance  with  his  first  intention;  the  other  of  his 
fragments  and  experiments,  things  begun  and  broken 
off  either  from  external  causes  or  because  in  the  execu- 
tion the  poet  changed  his  mind  or  his  inspiration  failed 
to  sustain  itself.  I  shall  ask  the  reader  to  consider 
the  two  classes  separately,  the  achievements  first: 
not  because  there  may  not  be  even  finer  work  in 
some  of  the  fragments,  but  because  a  thing  incomplete, 
a  torso,  however  splendid  in  power  and  promise,  cannot 
be  judged  on  the  same  terms  or  with  the  same  approach 
to  finality  as  a  thing  of  which  the  whole  is  before  us. 

385 


386  MINOR  ACHIEVEMENTS 

One  finished  thing  only,  the  play  of  OtJw  the  Greats  I 
shall  turn  over  to  the  second  or  experimental  class, 
seeing  that  an  experiment  it  essentially  was,  and  one 
tried  under  conditions  which  made  it  impossible  for 
Keats  to  be  his  true  seK. 

The  class  of  achievements  will  include,  then,  besides 
a  score  of  sonnets  and  a  few  minor  pieces  of  various 
form,  the  three  completed  tales  in  verse,  Isabella,  or  the 
Pot  of  Basil,  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  and  Lamia  ;  with  the 
six  odes.  To  Psyche,  On  Indolence  (not  published  in 
Keats's  lifetime).  On  a  Grecian  Urn,  To  a  Nightingale,  To 
Melancholy,  and  To  Autumn.  Beginning  with  the 
minor  things,— the  sonnets,  being  mostly  occasional 
and  autobiographical,  have  been  sufficiently  touched 
on  in  our  narrative  chapters,  and  so  have  several  of  the 
shorter  lyrics.  In  drear-nighted  December,  Meg  Merri- 
lies,  and  La  Belle  Dame  Sans  Merci.  There  remains 
chiefly  the  batch  of  pieces  in  the  seven-syllable  couplet 
metre  printed  in  the  Lamia  volume  between  the  odes 
To  Psyche  and  To  Autumn.  Two  of  these.  Lines  on 
the  Mermaid  Tavern  and  Robin  Hood,  were  written,  as 
we  have  seen,  at  the  beginning  of  1818,  in  the  months 
when  Keats  was  living  alone  in  Well  Walk  and  resting 
after  his  labour  on  Endymion.  Both  are  easy,  spirited, 
and  intensely  English  in  feeling;  both,  for  all  their 
gay  lightness  of  touch,  are  marked  with  that  vivid 
imaginative  life  in  single  phrases  which  almost  from 
the  first,  amidst  all  the  rawnesses  of  his  youth,  stamps 
Keats  for  a  poet  of  the  great  lineage.  Already  two 
years  earlier,  in  the  valentine  'Hadst  thou  liv'd  in  days 
of  old,'  he  had  shown  a  fair  command  of  this  metre, 
and  now  we  can  feel  that  he  has  an  ear  well  trained  in 
its  cadences  by  familiarity  with  the  finest  early  models, 
from  Fletcher  (in  the  Faithful  Shepherdess)  and  Ben 
Jonson  (in  the  masque  of  The  Satyr,  the  songs  To 
Celia,  and  the  Charts  lyrics)  down  to  U Allegro  and 
II  Penseroso. 

The  other  two  pieces  in  the  same  form.  Bards  of  Passion 
and  of  Mirth  and  Fancy,  date  from  nearly  a  year  later, 


BARDS  OF  PASSION  AND  OF  MIRTH    387 

when  Keats  had  settled  under  Brown's  roof  after  Tom's 
death,  and  were  copied  by  him  for  his  brother  in  a 
letter  dated  January  2nd,  1819.  In  the  Mermaid  Tavern 
Knes  he  had  followed  in  fancy  the  poet-guests  of  that 
hostelry  to  the  Elysian  fields  and  asked  them  if  they 
found  there  any  finer  entertainment  than  in  their  old 
haunt.  In  Bards  of  Passion  and  of  Mirth,  which  he 
wrote  on  a  blank  page  in  Dilke's  copy  of  Beaumont 
and  Fletcher,  Keats  singles  out  this  particular  pair  of 
poet-partners  to  follow  beyond  the  grave,  and  in  a 
strain  somewhat  more  serious  teUs  of  the  double  lives 
they  lead, — ^their  souls  left  here  on  earth  in  their 
writings,  and  themselves — 

Seated  on  Elysian  lawns 

Brows'd  by  none  but  Dian's  fawns  .  .  . 

Where  the  nightingale  doth  sing 

Not  a  senseless,  tranced  thing, 

But  divine,  melodious  truth; 

Philosophic  numbers  smooth; 

Tales  and  golden  histories 

Of  heaven  and  its  mysteries. 

In  the  affirmation  with  which  the  piece  concludes, — 

Bards  of  Passion  and  of  Mirth, 
Ye  have  left  your  souls  on  Earth ! 
Ye  have  souls  in  heaven  too, 
Double-livM  in  regions  new ! — 

in  this  affirmation  it  seems,  as  Mr  Buxton  Forman  has 
pointed  out,  as  though  Keats  were  gaily  coimtering  the 
view  of  Wordsworth  in  the  well-known  stanzas  where, 
declaring  how  the  power  of  Burns  survives  'deep  in  the 
general  heart  of  men,'  he  goes  on  to  ask  what  need  has 
the  poet  for  any  other  kind  of  Elysian  after-life.^ 

Following  an  eighteenth-century  practice,  Keats  calls 
this  set  of  heptasyllabics  an  ode,  a  form  which  in  strict- 
ness it  no  way  resembles.  A  higher  place  is  taken  in 
his  work  by  the  longest  poem  he  sends  his  brother  in 
the  same  metre,  Fancy.    He  calls  it  a  rondeau,  again 

1  Thoughts  siiggested  on  the  hanks  of  Nith,  near  the  poet^s  residence:  the 
third  poem  in  Memorials  of  a  Tour  in  Scotland. 


388  FANCY 

rather  at  random;  but  he  had  already  called  the  Bacchus 
lyric  in  Endymion  sl  roundelay,  and  seems  to  have  thought 
that  the  name  might  apply  to  any  set  of  verses  return- 
ing upon  itself  at  the  end  with  a  repetition  of  its 
beginning.  In  the  present  case  he  both  opens  and 
closes  his  poem  with  the  same  idea  as  has  been  con- 
densed by  a  later  writer  in  the  two-line  refrain — 

But  every  poet,  born  to  stray. 
Still  feeds  upon  the  far-away. 

The  opening  lines  run, — 

Ever  let  the  Fancy  roam. 

Pleasure  never  is  at  home: 

At  a  touch  sweet  Pleasure  melteth. 

Like  to  bubbles  when  rain  pelteth; 

Then  let  winged  Fancy  wander 

Through  the  thought  still  spread  beyond  her: 

Open  wide  the  mind's  cage-door. 

She'll  dart  forth,  and  cloudward  soar. 

O  sweet  Fancy !  let  her  loose; 

Summer's  joys  are  spoilt  by  use. 

And  the  enjoying  of  the  Spring 

Fades  as  does  its  blossoming; 

Autumn's  red-lipp'd  fruitage  too, 

Blushing  through  the  mist  and  dew. 

Cloys  with  tasting:  What  do  then? 

The  answer  is  that  the  thing  to  do  is  to  sit  by  the  chimney 
comer  while  Fancy  goes  ranging  abroad  to  find  and 
bring  home  a  harvest  of  incompatible  and  contradictory 
delights;  and  after  the  evocation  of  a  number  of  such 
the  poem  comes  round  at  the  end  to  a  slightly  altered 
repetition  of  its  opening  couplet, — 

Let  the  winged  Fancy  roam 
Pleasure  never  is  at  home. 

I  like  to  think  that  Keats  may  have  drawn  his  impulse 
to  writing  this  poem  from  the  fine  passage  in  Fuller's 
Holy  State  quoted  by  Lamb  in  his  brief  'Specimens' 
of  that  author^  : — 

*  First  printed  in  Hunt's  Reflector  and  reprinted  in  the  two-volume 
edition  of  Lamb's  works  published  in  1818. 


THE  TALES— ISABELLA  389 

Fancy. — It  is  the  most  boundless  and  restless  faculty  of  the 
soul.  ...  it  digs  without  spade,  sails  without  ship,  flies  without 
wings,  builds  without  charges,  fights  without  bloodshed;  in  a 
moment  striding  from  the  centre  to  the  circumference  of  the 
world;  by  a  kind  of  omnipotency  creating  and  annihilating 
things  in  an  instant;  and  things  divorced  in  Nature  are  married 
in  Fancy  as  in  a  lawless  place. 

At  any  rate  Keats's  poem,  in  its  best  and  central  part, 
is  a  delightful  embroidery  on  the  ideas  here  expressed. 
The  notion,  or  vision,  of  a  lawless  place  where  all  manner 
of  things  divorced  in  nature  abide  together  and  happily 
jostle,  was  one  that  often  haimted  him,  as  witness  his 
verse-epistle  to  Reynolds  from  Teignmouth,  the  frag- 
ment he  calls  The  Castle  Builder,  and  again  the  piece 
beginning  'Welcome  joy  and  welcome  sorrow,'  to  which 
there  has  been  posthumously  given  the  title  A  Song  of 
Opposites.  The  lines  evoking  such  a  vision  in  this 
poem.  Fancy,  are  almost  his  happiest  in  his  lighter  vein, 
and  are  written  in  the  true  EHzabethan  tradition:  the 
predominant  influence  in  the  handling  of  the  measure 
being,  to  my  ear,  that  of  Ben  Jonson,  who  is  wont  to 
give  it  a  certain  weight  and  slowness  of  movement  by 
the  free  use  of  long  syllables  in  the  unaccented  places; 
even  so  Keats,  in  the  passage  quoted  above,  puts  in 
such  places  words  like  'sweet,'  'rain,'  'still,'  'cage,' 
'dart,'  'lipp'd.' 

Passing  from  the  minor  to  the  major  achievements 
of  the  time,  the  earliest,  and  to  my  mind  the  finest,  of 
these  is  Isabella,  or  the  Pot  of  Basil,  During  the  writing 
of  Endymion,  Keats  had  intended  his  next  effort  to  be 
on  the  lofty  classic  and  symboHc  theme  of  the  dethrone- 
ment of  Hyperion  and  the  Titans  and  the  accession  of 
Apollo  and  the  Olympians.  But  certain  reading  and 
talk  in  the  Hunt  circle  having  diverted  him  from  this 
purpose  for  a  while,  and  made  him  take  up  the  idea  of 
a  volume  of  metrical  tales  from  Boccaccio  to  be  written 
jointly  by  himself  and  Reynolds,  he  chose  the  tale  of 
the  Pot  of  Basil  (the  fifth  of  the  fourth  day  in  the  De- 
cameron), made  a  sudden  beginning  at  it  before  he 


390  STORY  AND  METRE 

left  Hampstead  at  the  end  of  February  (1819),  and 
finished  it  at  Teignmouth  in  the  course  of  April.  As 
an  appropriate  vehicle  for  an  Italian  story  he  took  the 
Italian  ottava  rima  or  stanza  of  eight.  Several  of  the 
earlier  English  poets  had  used  this  metre:  Keats's 
main  model  for  it  was  doubtless  Edward  Fairfax,  who, 
following  other  Elizabethan  translators,  had  in  his  fine 
version  from  Tasso,  Godfrey  of  Bulloigne,  done  much 
more  than  any  of  his  predecessors  towards  suppling 
and  perfecting  its  treatment  in  English.  Since  then  it 
had  been  little  employed  in  our  serious  poetry,  but  had 
lately  been  brilliantly  revived  for  flippant  and  satiric 
uses,  after  later  Italian  models,  by  Hookham  Frere 
and  Byron.  Keats  goes  over  the  heads  of  these  direct 
to  Fairfax,  and  in  certain  points  at  least,  in  variety  of 
pause  and  cadence  and  subtle  adaptation  of  verbal 
music  to  emotional  effect,  by  a  good  deal  outdoes  even 
that  excellent  master.^  Of  course  it  is  of  the  essence  of 
his  treatment  to  avoid,  in  the  closing  couplet  of  the 
stanza,  the  special  effect  of  witty  snap  and  suddenness 
which  fits  it  so  well  for  the  purpose  of  satire. 

Every  one  knows  the  story:  how  a  maiden  of  Messina 
(Keats  chooses  to  transfer  the  scene  to  Florence),  hving 
in  the  house  of  her  merchant  brothers,  in  secret  loves 
one  of  their  clerks:  how  her  brothers,  discovering  her 
secret,  take  out  her  lover  to  the  forest  and  there  slay 
and  bury  him:  how  his  ghost  appearing  to  her  in  a 
dream  reveals  his  fate  and  burial  place:  how  she 
hastens  thither  with  her  nurse,  digs  till  she  finds  the 
corpse  and  having  found  it  carries  home  the  head  and 
sets  it  in  a  pot  of  basil,  or  sweet  marjoram,  which  she 
cherishes  and  waters  with  her  tears  imtil  her  brothers 
take  it  from  her,  whereupon  she  pines  away  and  dies. 

Boccaccio  tells  this  story  with  that  admirable  com- 
bination of  straightforward  conciseness  and  finished 
grace  which  characterizes  his  mature  prose.  Keats  in 
his  poem  romantically  amplifies  and  embroiders  it.    In 

*  A  copy  of  Fairfax's  Tasso  appears  in  the  list  of  books  left  by  Keats  at 
his  death. 


INFLUENCE  OF  CHAUCER  391 

his  way  of  doing  so  we  can  trace  the  influence  of  Chaucer, 
with  whose  Trailus  and  Criseyde,  that  miracle  of  detailed, 
long-drawn,  yet  ever  human  and  rarely  tedious  narrative, 
he  was  by  this  time  familiar.  Keats,  while  avoiding 
Chaucer's  prolixity,  diversifies  his  tale  with  invocations 
to  Love  and  to  the  Muses,  with  apostrophes  to  the 
reader  and  ejaculatory  comments  on  the  events,  en- 
tirely in  Chaucer's  manner:  only  whereas  Chaucer 
relegates  the  more  part  of  such  matter  to  the  ^proems' 
of  his  several  books,  Keats,  having  plunged  into  the 
thick  of  the  story  in  his  first  line,  finds  room  for  his 
apostrophes  and  invocations  in  the  course  of  the  narrative 
itself.  Most  critics  have  taken  the  view  that  this  is 
evidence  of  weak  or  immature  art.  To  my  mind  this 
is  not  so:  the  pauses  thus  introduced  are  never  long 
enough  to  hold  up  the  flow  and  interest  of  the  narrative, 
while  they  afford  welcome  rests  to  the  attention,  pleasant 
changes  from  a  too  sustained  narrative  construction, 
with  consequent  beautiful  and  happy  modulations  in 
the  movement  of  the  verse. 

One  of  these  invocations — ^invocation  and  apology 
together — is  to  Boccaccio  himself,  disowning  aU  idea 
of  improving  the  tale  and  defining  the  poet's  attempt 
as  maxie  but  to  honom*  him, — 

To  stead  thee  as  a  verse  in  English  tongue. 
An  echo  of  thee  in  the  north-wind  sung. 

The  definition  is  exact.  The  revived  spirit  of  English 
romantic  poetry  breathes  in  every  line  of  the  verse, 
and  as  in  Endymion,  so  here,  the  southern  setting  is 
conceived  as  though  it  were  EngHsh.  ^So  the  two 
brothers  and  their  murder'd  man'  (the  force  of  the 
anticipatory  epithet  has  been  celebrated  by  every  critic 
since  Lamb) — 

So  the  two  brothers  and  their  murdered  man 
Rode  past  fair  Florence,  to  where  Arno's  stream 

Gurgles  through  straiten'd  banks,  and  still  doth  fan 
Itself  with  dancing  bulrush,  and  the  bream 

Keep  head  against  the  freshets. 


392      APOSTROPHES  AND  INVOCATIONS 

Another  such  criticized  'digression'  tells  of  the  toilers 
yoked  in  all  quarters  of  the  world  to  the  service  of  these 
avaricious  merchant  brothers.  In  calling  up  their  suf- 
ferings Keats  for  a  moment  strikes  an  unexpected  verbal 
echo  from  the  Annus  Mirabilis  of  Dryden.^  Dryden, 
telling  of  the  monopolies  of  the  Dutch  in  the  East  India 
trade,  had  written, — 

For  them  alone  the  Heav'ns  had  kindly  heat. 
In  eastern  quarries  ripening  precious  dew: 

For  them  the  Idumean  balm  did  sweat. 
And  in  hot  Ceilon  spicy  forests  grew. 

Keats  writes  of  Isabella's  brothers,— 

For  them  the  Ceylon  diver  held  his  breath. 
And  went  all  naked  to  the  hungry  shark. 
For  them  his  ears  gush'd  blood — 

with  more  in  the  same  strain,  very  vividly  and  himianly 
imagined,  but  somewhat  unevenly  written.  On  the  other 
hand  the  last  of  the  rests  or  interruptions  in  this  poem 
is  to  my  thinking  one  of  its  most  original  and  admir- 
able beauties:  I  mean  the  invocation  beginning  'O 
Melancholy,  linger  here  awhile,'  repeated  with  lovely 
modulations  in  stanzas  Iv,  Ivi,  and  Ixi;  the  poet 
deliberately  pausing  to  heighten  his  effect  as  it  were 
by  an  accompaniment  of  words  chosen  purely  for  their 
pathetic  melody  and  more  musical  than  music  itself. 

Keats's  way  of  imagining  and  telling  the  story  is  not 
less  delicate  than  it  is  intense.  Flaws  and  false  notes 
there  are:  phrases,  as  in  Endymiony  too  dulcet  and 
cloying,  like  that  which  tells  how  the  lover's  lips  grew 
bold,  *And  poesied  with  hers  in  dewy  rhyme':  a  flat 
line  where  it  is  most  out  of  place — 'And  Isabella  did 
not  stamp  or  rave':  a  far-fetched  rime,  as  where  'love' 
and  'grove'  draw  in  after  them  the  alien  idea  of  Lorenzo 
not  being  embalmed  in  'Indian  clove.'  But  such  flaws, 
abundant  in  Endymion,  are  in  Isabella  rare  and  need 
to  be  searched  for.    If  we  want  an  example  of  the  staple 

*  This  point  has  been  made  by  Mr  Buxton  Forman,  Complete  Works  of 
J,  K.,  ii.  p.  41,  footnote. 


HORROR  TURNED  TO  BEAUTY    393 

tissue  of  the  poem  we  shall  rather  find  it  in  a  stanza 
like  this: — 

Parting  they  seemed  to  tread  upon  the  air, 
Twin  roses  by  the  zephyr  blown  apart 

Only  to  meet  again  more  close,  and  share 
The  inward  fragrance  of  each  other's  heart. 

She,  to  her  chamber  gone,  a  ditty  fair 
Sang  of  delicious  love  and  honey 'd  dart; 

He  with  light  steps  went  up  a  western  hill. 

And  bade  the  sun  farewell,  and  joy'd  his  fill. 

The  image  of  love-happiness  in  the  last  couplet  is  as 
jocimd  and  uplifting  as  some  radiant  symboHc  drawing 
by  Blake,  and  poetry  has  few  things  more  perfect  or 
easier  in  their  perfection. 

In  a  far  more  difficult  kind,  where  Keats  has  to  deal 
with  the  features  of  the  story  that  might  easily  make 
for  the  repulsive  or  the  macabre,  he  triumphs  not  by 
shirking  but  by  sheer  force  of  passionate  imagination. 
'The  excellence  of  every  art  is  its  intensity,  capable  of 
making  all  disagreeables  evaporate  from  their  being  in 
close  relationship  with  beauty  and  truth.'  This  dictum 
of  Keats  can  scarcely  be  better  illustrated  than  by  his 
own  handling  of  the  Isabella  story.  Take  the  vision  of 
the  murdered  man  appearing  to  the  girl  at  night: — 

Strange  sound  it  was,  when  the  pale  shadow  spake; 

For  there  was  striving,  in  its  piteous  tongue. 
To  speak  as  when  on  earth  it  was  awake. 

And  Isabella  on  its  music  hung: 
Languor  there  was  in  it,  and  tremulous  shake. 

As  in  a  palsied  Druid's  harp  unstrung; 
And  through  it  moan'd  a  ghostly  under-song. 
Like  hoarse  night-gusts  sepulchral  briars  among. 

Its  eyes,  though  wild,  were  still  all  dewy  bright 

With  love,  and  kept  all  phantom  fear  aloof 
From  the  poor  girl  by  magic  of  their  light. 

How  wonderfully,  in  these  touches,  do  we  feel  love 
prevailing  over  horror  and  purging  the  apparition  of 
all  its  charnel  ghastliness.    When  we  come  to  the  dis- 


394  THE  DIGGING  SCENE 

covery  and  digging  up  of  the  body,  Boccaccio  turns 
the  difficulty  which  must  inhere  in  any  reahstic  treat- 
ment of  the  theme  by  simply  saying  that  it  was  un- 
corrupted;  as  though  some  kind  of  miracle  had  kept 
it  fresh.  Keats  on  the  other  hand  confronts  the  diffi- 
culty and  overcomes  it.  First  he  acknowledges  how 
the  imagination  in  dwelling  on  the  dead  is  prone  to 
call  up  images  of  corruptibility: — 

Who  hath  not  loiter'd  in  a  green  church-yard. 

And  let  his  spirit,  like  a  demon-mole. 
Work  through  the  clayey  soil  and  gravel  hard. 

To  see  scull,  coffin'd  bones,  and  funeral  stole; 
Pitying  each  form  that  hungry  Death  hath  marr'd. 

And  filling  it  once  more  with  human  soul  ? 
Ah !  this  is  holiday  to  what  was  felt 
When  Isabella  by  Lorenzo  knelt. 

Then  he  compulsively  leads  away  the  mind  from  such 
images  to  think  only  of  the  passionate  absorption  with 
which  Isabella  flings  herself  upon  her  task : — 

She  gaz'd  into  the  fresh-thrown  mould,  as  though 
One  glance  did  fully  all  its  secrets  tell; 

Clearly  she  saw,  as  other  eyes  would  know 
Pale  limbs  at  bottom  of  a  crystal  well; 

Upon  the  murderous  spot  she  seem'd  to  grow. 
Like  to  a  native  lilly  of  the  dell: 

Then  with  her  knife,  all  sudden,  she  began 

To  dig  more  fervently  than  misers  can. 

Soon  she  turned  up  a  soiled  glove,  whereon 
Her  silk  had  play'd  in  purple  phantasies. 

She  kiss'd  it  with  a  lip  more  chill  than  stone. 
And  put  it  in  her  bosom,  where  it  dries 

And  freezes  utterly  unto  the  bone 

Those  dainties  made  to  still  an  infant's  cries: 

Then  'gan  she  work  again;  nor  stayed  her  care. 

But  to  throw  back  at  times  her  veiling  hair. 

Is  any  scene  in  poetry  written  with  more  piercing, 
more  unerring,  vision?  The  swift  despairing  gaze  of 
the  girl,  anticipating  with  too  dire  a  certainty  the 
realization  of  her  dream:  the  simOe  in  the  third  and 


Plate  X 


2/ 


1 
^^  c-LC^^jjjLs.  did  Htloj  oM^  lU    JCCULU   ttcl. 


mt'  i  a  /UaMat.  iM  cj  Hl  cUk  :  | 

^d  ^Ui/r  vlt.x,   ii^r  rj^£rii>,    onluj  J-  Maxj     \ 
n      ,    ■'''  li -^  I      n      ,<i  I 


PAGE  FROM  ISABELLA;  OR,  THE  POT  OF  BASIL 

FROM   AN   AUTOGRAPH   BY   KEATS   IN   THE   BRITISH   MUSEUM 


ITS  QUALITY  395 

fourth  lines,  emphasizing  the  clearness  of  that  certainty, 
and  at  the  same  time  relieving  its  terror  by  an  image 
of  beauty:  the  new  simile  of  the  lily,  again  striking  the 
note  of  beauty,  while  it  intensifies  the  impression  of 
her  rooted  fixity  of  posture  and  purpose:  the  sudden 
solution  of  that  fixity,  with  the  final  couplet,  into 
vehement  action,  as  she  begins  (with  a  fine  implied  com- 
mentary on  the  relative  strength  of  passions)  to  dig 
'more  fervently  than  misers  can': — ^then  the  first 
reward  of  her  toil,  in  the  shape  of  a  relic  not  ghastly, 
but  beautiful  both  in  itself  and  for  the  tenderness  of 
which  it  is  a  token:  her  womanly  action  in  kissing  it 
and  putting  it  in  her  bosom,  while  all  the  woman  and 
mother  in  her  is  in  the  same  words  revealed  to  us  as 
blighted  by  the  tragedy  of  her  life:  then  the  resimiption 
and  continuance  of  her  labours,  with  gestiu-es  once 
more  of  vital  dramatic  truth  as  well  as  grace: — to 
imagine  and  to  write  like  this  is  the  privilege  of  the 
best  poets  only,  and  even  the  best  have  not  often  com- 
bined such  concentrated  force  and  beauty  of  conception 
with  such  a  limpid  and  flowing  ease  of  narrative.^ 
Poetry  had  always  come  to  Keats  as  naturally  as  leaves 
to  a  tree.  So  he  considered  it  ought  to  come,  and 
now  that  it  came  of  a  quality  like  this,  he  had  fairly 
earned  the  right,  which  his  rash  youth  had  too  soon 
arrogated,  to  look  down  on  the  fine  artificers  of  the 
school  of  Pope.  In  comparison  with  the  illimainating 
power  of  true  imaginative  poetry,  the  closest  rhetorical 
condensations  of  that  school  seem  thin,  their  most  glit- 
tering points  and  aphorisms  mechanical:  nay,  those 
who  admire  them  most  justly  will  know  better  than 
to  think  the  two  kinds  of  writing  comparable. 

The  final  consignment  by  Isabella  of  her  treasure  to 
its  casket  is  told  with  the  same  genius  for  turning 
horror  into   beauty:  note   the   third   and  fourth  lines 

^  I  let  this  paragraph,  somewhat  officious  and  over-explanatory  though 
it  now  seems  to  me,  stand  as  I  wrote  it  thirty  years  ago,  for  the  sake  of 
the  pleasure  I  have  since  had  in  learning  that  the  identical  passage  was 
singled  out  by  Charles  Lamb,  in  a  notice  which  has  only  lately  come  to 
Hght  (see  below,  p.  471),  as  the  pick  of  the  whole  Lamia  volume. 


396  THE  EVE  OF  ST  AGNES 

of  the  following,  with  the  magically  cooling  and  soothing 
effect  of  their  open-vowelled  sonority; — 

Then  in  a  silken  scarf, — sweet  with  the  dews 

Of  precious  flowers  pluck'd  in  Araby,  j 

And  divine  liquids  come  with  odorous  ooze 
Through  the  cold  serpent-pipe  refreshfuUy, — 

She  wrapp'd  it  up ;  and  for  its  tomb  did  choose 
A  garden-pot,  wherein  she  laid  it  by. 

And  cover'd  it  with  mould,  and  o'er  it  set 

Sweet  Basil,  which  her  tears  kept  ever  wet. 

And  she  forgot  the  stars,  the  moon,  and  sun. 
And  she  forgot  the  blue  above  the  trees. 

And  she  forgot  the  dells  where  waters  run. 
And  she  forgot  the  chilly  autumn  breeze; 

She  had  no  knowledge  when  the  day  was  done. 
And  the  new  morn  she  saw  not:  but  in  peace 

Hung  over  her  sweet  Basil  evermore. 

And  moisten'd  it  with  tears  unto  the  core. 

In  passages  like  these  of  Isabella  Keats,  for  one 
reader  at  least,  reaches  his  high-water  mark  in  himaan 
feeling,  and  in  felicity  both  imaginative  and  executive. 
The  next  of  his  three  poetic  tales.  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes, 
does  not  strike  so  deep,  though  it  is  more  nearly  fault- 
less and  lives  as  the  most  complete  and  enchanting 
English  pure  romance-poem  of  its  time.  Little  or  none 
of  the  effect  is  due  in  this  case  to  elements  of  magic 
weirdness  or  supernatural  terror  such  as  counted  for 
so  much  in  the  general  romantic  poetry  of  the  day, 
and  had  been  of  the  very  essence  of  achievements  so 
diverse  as  The  Ancient  Manner,  Christahel,  The  Lay  of 
the  Last  Minstrel,  and  Isabella  itself.  The  tale  hinges 
on  the  popular  belief  that  on  St  Agnes's  Eve  (January 
the  20th)  a  maiden  might  win  sight  of  her  future 
husband  in  a  dream  by  going  to  bed  supperless, 
silent  and  without  looking  behind  her,  and  sleeping  on 
her  back  with  her  hands  on  the  pillow  above  her  head. 
This  belief  is  mentioned  by  two  writers  at  least  with 
whom  Keats  was  very  familiar:  by  Ben  Jonson  in  his 
masque  The  Satyr  and  Robert  Burton  in  the  Anatomy 


VARIETY  OF  SOURCES  397 

0/  Melancholy,  An  eighteenth-century  book  of  refer- 
ence which  he  may  well  have  known  also,  Brand's 
Popular  Antiquities,  cites  the  superstition  and  adds 
from  a  current  chapbook  a  fuller  account  of  it,  mention- 
ing other  and  alternative  rites.  But  one  feature  of 
the  promised  vision  which  in  Keats's  mind  was  evi- 
dently essential,  that  the  lover  should  regale  his  mistress 
after  her  fasting  dream  with  exquisite  viands  and  music, 
is  not  noted  in  any  of  these  sources:  Keats  must  either 
have  invented  it  or  drawn  it  from  some  other  authority 
which  criticism  has  not  yet  recognised. 

It  was  an  obvious  and  easy  idea  for  Keats  to  weave 
into  the  St  Agnes's  Eve  motive  the  motive  of  a  love- 
passion  between  the  son  and  daughter  of  hostile  houses, 
and  to  bring  the  youth  to  a  festival  in  the  halls  of  his 
enemies  in  a  manner  which  reminds  one  both  of  Romeo 
and  Juliet  and  of  the  young  Lochinvar  in  Scott's 
ballad.  A  remoter  source  has  lately  been  pointed  out 
as  probable  for  the  subsequent  incidents  of  the  lover's 
concealment  by  the  old  nurse  in  a  closet  next  the  maiden's 
chamber,  his  coming  in  to  her  while  she  sleeps,  the 
melting  of  his  real  self  into  her  dream  of  him,  her  momen- 
tary disenchantment  and  alarm  on  awakening,  her 
re-assurance  and  surrender  and  their  ensuing  happy 
imion  and  flight.  All  these  circumstances,  it  has  been 
shown,  except  the  immediate  flight  of  the  lovers,  are 
closely  paralleled  in  Boccaccio's  early  novel  II  Fihcolo, 
and  look  as  though  they  must  have  been  derived  from 
it.  The  Filocolo  is  an  excessively  tedious  and  occasion- 
ally coarse  amplification  in  prose,  made  by  Boccaccio 
when  his  style  was  still  unformed,  of  the  old  French 
metrical  romance,  long  popular  throughout  Europe,  of 
Floire  et  Blancheflor.  The  question  is,  how  should 
Keats  have  come  to  be  acquainted  with  it?  At  this 
time  he  knew  very  little  Italian.  He  was  accustomed 
to  read  his  Decameron  in  a  translation,^  and  eight 
months  later  we  find  him  with  difficulty  making  out 

1  That  published  by  Allan  Awnmarsh,  5th  ed.  1684,  notes  Woodhouse; 
and  a  copy  of  the  same  is  noted  in  the  hst  of  Keats's  books. 


398  BOCCACCIO'S  FILOCOLO 

Ariosto  at  the  rate  of  ten  or  a  dozen  stanzas  a  day.  A 
French  seventeenth-century  version  of  the  Filocolo  in- 
deed existed,  but  none  in  EngHsh.  Can  it  be  that  Hunt 
had  told  Keats  the  story,  or  at  least  those  parts  of  it 
which  would  serve  him,  in  the  course  of  talk  about 
Boccaccio?  One  would  not  have  expected  even 
Hunt's  love  of  Italian  reading  to  sustain  him  through 
the  tedium  of  this  early  and  little  known  novel  by  the 
master:  moreover  in  criticizing  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes  he 
gives  no  hint  that  Keats  was  indebted  to  him  for  any 
of  its  incidents.  But  there  the  resemblances  are,  too 
close  to  be  easily  explained  as  coincidences.  The  part 
played  by  the  old  nurse  Angela  in  Keats's  poem  echoes 
pretty  closely  the  part  played  by  Glorizia  in  the  Filocolo; 
the  drama,  dreaming  and  awake,  played  between 
Madeline  and  Porphyro,  repeats,  though  in  a  far  finer 
strain,  that  between  Biancofiore  and  Florio;  so  that 
Keats's  narrative  reads  truly  like  a  magically  refined 
and  enriched  quintessence  distilled  from  the  corre- 
sponding chapter  in  Boccaccio's  tale.^ 

But  the  question  of  sources  is  one  for  the  special 
student,    and   its   discussion   may   easily   tire   the   lay 


*See  article  by  H.  Noble  M'Cracken  in  Philological  Journal  of  the  Chicago 
University,  Vol.  1908.  The  romance  of  Flaire  and  Blancheflor,  which 
Boccaccio  in  the  Filocolo  expands  with  additions  and  inventions  of  his 
own,  tells  the  story  of  a  Moorish  prince  in  Spain  and  a  Christian  damsel, 
brought  up  together  and  loving  each  other  as  children  and  thrown  apart 
in  maturity  by  adverse  influences  and  ill  fortune.  After  many  chivalric 
and  fantastic  adventures  both  in  West  and  East,  of  the  kind  usual  in  such 
romances,  judicial  combats,  captures  by  corsairs,  warnings  by  a  magic 
rin^  and  the  like,  Floire  learns  that  Blancheflor  is  immured  with  other 
ladies  in  an  impregnable  tower  by  the  'Admiral  of  Babylon,'  who  desires 
to  marry  her.  To  Babylon  Floire  follows,  cajoles  the  guardian  of  the  tower 
and  one  of  her  damsels  to  admit  him  to  her  chamber  concealed  in  a  basket 
of  roses:  whence  issuing,  he  and  she  are  brought  to  one  another's  arms 
in  happiness;  various  other  adventures  ensuing  before  they  can  be  finally 
free  and  united.  There  exists  a  fragmentary  English  mediaeval  version 
of  this  romance,  which  might  easily  have  been  known  to  Keats  from  the 
abstract  and  quotations  given  by  George  Ellis  in  his  Specimens  of  Early 
English  Metrical  Romance  (1806).  But  unluckily  neither  this  nor,  appar- 
ently, any  version  of  the  original  French  romance  poem  contains  those 
incidents  recounted  in  the  Filocolo  to  which  Keats's  poem  runs  most  closely 
parallel.  These  we  must  accordingly  suppose  to  be  Boccaccio's  own  inven- 
tion and  to  have  been  known  to  Keats,  directly  or  indirectly,  from  the 
Filocolo  itself. 


POETIC  SCOPE  AND  METHOD  399 

reader.  Passing  to  the  poem  and  its  qualities,  we  have 
to  note  first  that,  fresh  from  treading,  in  his  Hyperion 
attempt,  in  the  path  of  Milton,  Keats  in  The  Eve  of  St 
Agnes  went  back,  so  far  as  his  manner  is  derivative  at 
all,  to  the  example  of  his  first  master,  Spenser.  He 
shows  as  perfect  a  command  of  the  Spenserian  stanza, 
with  its  ^sweet-slipping  movement,'  as  Spenser  himself, 
and  as  subtle  a  sense  as  his  of  the  leisurely  meditative 
pace  imposed  upon  the  metre  by  the  lingering  Alexan- 
drine at  the  close.  Narrating  at  this  pace  and  in  this 
mood,  he  is  able  at  any  moment  with  the  lightest  of 
touches  to  launch  the  imagination  to  music  on  a  voyage 
beyond  the  beyonds,  and  to  charge  every  line,  every  word 
almost,  with  a  richness  and  fullness  of  far-away  sugges- 
tion that  yet  never  clogs  the  easy  harmonious  flow  of 
the  verse.  At  the  same  time  he  does  not,  in  this  new 
poem,  attempt  anything  like  the  depth  of  himian 
passion  and  pathos  which  he  had  touched  in  Isabella, 
and  his  personages  appeal  to  us  in  the  manner 
strictly  defined  as  ^romantic,'  that  is  to  say  not  so 
much  humanly  and  in  themselves  as  by  the  circum- 
stances, scenery,  and  atmosphere  amidst  which  they 
move. 

In  handling  these  Keats's  method  is  the  reverse  of 
that  by  which  some  writers  vainly  endeavour  to  rival 
in  literature  the  effects  of  the  painter  and  sculptor.  He 
never  writes  for  the  eye  merely,  but  vivifies  everything 
he  touches,  telling  even  of  dead  and  senseless  things  in 
terms  of  life,  movement,  and  feeling.  From  the  open- 
ing stanza,  which  makes  us  feel  the  chill  of  the  season 
to  our  bones, — telling  us  first  of  its  effect  on  the  wild 
and  tame  creatures  of  wood  and  field,  and  next  how 
the  frozen  breath  of  the  old  beadsman  in  the  chapel 
aisle  ^seemM  taking  flight  for  heaven,  without  a 
death,' — from  thence  to  the  close,  where  the  lovers 
disappear  into  the  night,  the  poetry  throbs  in  every 
line  with  the  life  of  imagination  and  beauty.  The 
monuments  in  the  aisle  are  brought  before  us,  not 
by    any    effort    of    description,    but    solely    through 


400  EXAMPLES 

our  sjonpathy  with  the  shivering  fancy  of  the 
beadsman : — 

Knights,  ladies,  praying  in  dumb  oratories. 
He  passeth  by;  and  his  weak  spirit  fails 
To  think  how  they  may  ache  in  icy  hoods  and  mails. 

Even  into  the  sculptured  heads  of  the  corbels  supporting 
the  banquet-hall  roof  the  poet  strikes  life: — 

The  carved  angels,  ever  eager-eyed. 
Stared,  where  upon  their  heads  the  cornice  rests. 
With  wings  blown  back,  and  hands  put  cross-wise  on  their 
breasts.^ 

The  painted  panes  in  the  chamber  window,  instead  of 
trying  to  pick  out  their  beauties  in  detail,  he  calls — 

Innumerable  of  stains  and  splendid  dyes 

As  are  the  tiger-moth's  deep-damask'd  wings, — 

a  gorgeous  phrase  which  leaves  the  widest  range  to  the 
colour-imagination  of  the  reader,  giving  it  at  the  same 
time  a  sufficient  clue  by  the  simile  drawn  from  a  partic- 
ular specimen  of  nature's  blazonry .^  In  the  last  line 
of  the  same  stanza — 

A  shielded  scutcheon  blush'd  with  blood  of  queens  and  kings, 

— ^the  word  'blush'  makes  the  colour  seem  to  come 
and  go,  while  the  mind  is  at  the  same  time  sent  travelling 
from  the  maiden's  chamber  on  thoughts  of  her  lineage 
and  ancestral  fame.  Observation,  I  believe,  shows 
that  moonlight  has  not  the  power  to  transmit  the 
separate  hues  of  painted  glass  as  Keats  in  this  celebrated 

1  In  both  the  chapel  monuments  and  the  banquet-hall  corbels  there 
may  be  a  memory  of  the  following  passage  from  Gary's  Dante  (quoted 
by  Mr  Buxton  Forman  and  Prof,  de  S^lincourt) : — 

As  to  support  incumbent  floor  or  roof, 

For  corbel  is  a  figure  sometimes  seen 

That  crumples  up  its  knees  into  its  breast; 

With  the  feign'd  posture,  stirring  ruth  unfeign'd 

In  the  beholder's  fancy;  so  I  saw 

These  fashion'd — . 

*  It  may  be  noted  that  in  the  corresponding  scene  in  the  FUocolo  a  single 
special  colour  effect  is  got  by  describmg  the  room  as  lit  up  by  two  great 
pendent  self-luminous  carbuncles. 


THE  UNROBING  SCENE  401 

passage  represents  it,  but  fuses  them  into  a  kind  of 
neutral  or  indiscriminate  opaline  shimmer.  Let  us  be 
grateful  for  the  error,  if  error  it  is,  which  has  led  him 
to  heighten,  by  these  saintly  splendours  of  colour,  the 
sentiment  of  a  scene  wherein  a  voluptuous  glow  is  so 
exquisitely  attempered  with  chivalrous  chastity  and 
awe.  If  any  reader  wishes  to  realise  how  the  genius 
of  EUzabethan  romantic  poetry  re-awoke  in  Keats,  and 
how  much  enriched  and  enhanced,  after  two  himdred 
years,  let  him  compare  aU  this  scene  of  Madeline's 
unrobing  with  the  passage  from  Brown's  Britannia^s 
Pastorals  which  was  probably  in  his  memory  when  he 
wrote  it  (see  above,  p.  98). 

When  Madeline  unclasps  her  jewels,  a  weaker  poet 
would  have  dwelt  on  their  lustre  or  other  visible  quali- 
ties: Keats  puts  those  aside,  and  speaks  straight  to 
our  spirits  in  an  epithet  breathing  with  the  very  life  of 
the  wearer, — *Her  warmed  jewels.'  When  Porphyro 
spreads  the  feast  of  dainties  beside  his  sleeping  mistress, 
we  are  made  to  feel  how  those  ideal  and  rare  sweets 
of  sense  surround  and  minister  to  her,  not  only  with 
their  own  natural  richness,  but  with  the  associations 
and  the  homage  of  all  far  countries  whence  they  have 
been  gathered — 

From  silken  Samarcand  to  cedar'd  Lebanon. 

Concerning  this  sumptuous  passage  of  the  spread  feast 
of  fruits,  not  unequally  rivalling  the  famous  one  in 
Milton,^  Leigh  Hunt  has  some  interesting  things  to  say 
in  his  Autobiography  ^: — 

I  remember  Keats  reading  to  me,  with  great  relish  and  partic- 
ularity, conscious  of  what  he  had  set  forth,  the  lines  describing 
the  supper  and  ending  with  the  words. 

And  lucent  syrups  tinct  with  cinnamon. 

Mr  Wordsworth  would  have  said  the  vowels  were  not  varied 
enough;  but  Keats  knew  where  his  vowels  were  not  to  be  varied. 
On  the  occasion  above  alluded  to,  Wordsworth  found  fault  with 

1  Paradise  Lost,  v.  341-347.  2  Ed.  1860,  pp.  269,  270. 


402  THE  FEAST  OF  FRUIT 

the  repetition  of  the  concluding  sound  of  the  participles  in 
Shakespeare's  Hne  about  bees: — 

The  singing  masons  building  roofs  of  gold. 
This,  he  said,  was  a  line  which  Milton  would  never  have  written. 
Keats  thought,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  repetition  was  in 
harmony  with  the  continued  note  of  the  singers,  and  that  Shake- 
speare's negligence,  if  negligence  it  was,  had  instinctively  felt  the 
thing  in  the  best  manner. 

The  reader  will  remember  how  Bailey  records  this 
subject  of  the  musical  and  emotional  effect  of  vowel 
sounds,  open  and  close,  varied  or  iterated  as  the  case 
might  be,  as  one  on  which  Keats's  talk  had  often  run 
at  Oxford.  Whatever  his  theories,  he  was  by  this  time 
showing  himself  as  fine  a  master  of  such  effects  as  any, 
even  the  greatest,  of  our  poets.  This  same  passage,  or 
interlude,  of  the  feast  of  fruits  has  despite  its  beauty 
been  sometimes  blamed  as  a  'digression.'  A  stanza 
which  in  Keats's  original  draft  stood  near  the  begin- 
ning of  the  poem  shows  that  in  his  mind  it  was  no 
mere  ornament  and  no  digression  at  all,  but  an 
essential  part  of  his  scheme.  In  revision  he  dropped 
out  this  stanza,  doubtless  as  being  not  up  to  the  mark 
poetically:  pity  that  he  did  not  rather  perfect  it  and 
let  it  keep  its  place:  but  even  as  it  is  the  provision  of 
the  dainties  made  beforehand  by  the  old  nurse  at  Por- 
phyrons request  (stanza  xx)  proves  the  feast  essential 
to  the  story. 

While  the  unique  charm  of  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes  lies 
thus  in  the  richness  and  vitality  of  the  accessory  and 
decorative  images,  the  actions  and  emotions  of  the 
personages  are  not  less  happily  conceived  as  far  as  they 
go.  What  can  be  better  touched  than  the  figures  of 
the  beadsman  and  the  old  nurse  Angela?  How  admir- 
able in  particular  is  the  debate  held  by  Angela  with 
Porphyro  in  her 

little  moonlight  room 
Pale,  latticed,  chill,  and  silent  as  a  tomb. 

Madeline,  a  figure  necessarily  in  the  main  passive,  is 
none  the  less  exquisite,  whether  in  her  gentle  dealing 


A  ROUNDED  CLOSE  403 

with  the  nurse  on  the  staircase;  or  when  closing  her 
chamber  door  she  pants  with  quenched  taper  in  the 
moonHght,  and  most  of  all  when  awakening  she  finds 
her  lover  beside  her,  and  contrasts  his  bodily  presence 
with  her  dream: — 

*  Ah,  Porphyro  !'  said  she,  *but  even  now 

Thy  voice  was  at  sweet  tremble  in  mine  ear. 

Made  tuneable  with  every  sweetest  vow; 

And  those  sad  eyes  were  spiritual  and  clear: 

How  chang'd  thou  art !  how  pallid,  chill,  and  drear ! 

Give  me  that  voice  again,  my  Porphyro, 

Those  looks  immortal,  those  complainings  dear  V^ 

In  all  the  doings  and  circumstances  attending  the 
departure  of  the  lovers  for  a  destination  left  thrillingly 
vague  in  the  words,  'For  o'er  the  southern  moors  I  have 
a  home  for  thee/  ^ — in  the  elfin  storm  sent  to  cover 
their  flight  (the  only  touch  of  the  supernatural  in  the 
story),  their  darkling  grope  down  the  stairway,  the  hush 
that  holds  the  house  and  guest-chambers,  the  wind- 
shaken  arras,  the  porter  sprawling  asleep  beside  his 
empty  flagon,  the  awakened  bloodhound  who  recognizes 
his  mistress  and  is  quiet — in  Keats's  telling  of  all  these 
things  a  like  unflagging  richness  ancj  felicity  of  imagina- 
tion holds  us  spell-bound:  and  with  the  deaths  of  the 
old  nurse  and  beadsman,  once  the  house  has  lost  its 
spirit  of  life  and  light  in  Madeline,  the  poet  brings  roimd 
the  tale,  after  all  its  glow  of  passionate  colour  and  music, 
of  trembling  anticipation  and  love-worship  enraptured 

*  The  final  couplet  of  this  stanza,  as  Keats  wrote  it  after  several  attempts, 
is  weak.     Madeline  continues, — 

Oh  leave  me  not  in  this  eternal  woe, 

For  if  thou  diest,  my  love,  I  know  not  where  to  go. 

In  the  alternative  version,  intended  to  leave  no  doubt  of  what  had  happened, 
which  he  read  to  Woodhouse  and  Woodhouse  disapproved,  Madeline's 
speech  breaks  off  and  the  poet  in  his  own  name  adds, — 

See  while  she  speaks  his  arms  encroaching  slow 

Have  zon'd  her,  heart  to  heart, — loud,  loud,  the  dark  winds  blow. 

'  Keats,  mentally  placing  his  story  in  England  and  writing  it  at  Teign- 
mouth,  had  at  first  turned  this  line  otherwise, — 'For  o'er  the  bleak 
Dartmoor  I  have  a  home  for  thee.' 


404  LAMIA 

or  in  suspense,  to  a  chill  and  wintry  close  in  subtlest 
harmony  with  its  beginning: — 

They  glide,  like  phantoms,  into  the  wide  hall; 
Like  phantoms,  to  the  iron  porch,  they  glide; 
Where  lay  the  Porter,  in  uneasy  sprawl,  ^ 

With  a  huge  empty  flaggon  by  his  side: 
The  wakeful  bloodhound  rose,  and  shook  his  hide. 
But  his  sagacious  eye  an  inmate  owns: 
By  one,  and  one,  the  bolts  full  easy  slide: 
The  chains  lie  silent  on  the  footworn  stones; 
The  key  turns,  and  the  door  upon  its  hinges  groans. 

And  they  are  gone :  aye,  ages  long  ago 
These  lovers  fled  away  into  the  storm. 
That  night  the  Baron  dreamt  of  many  a  woe. 
And  all  his  warrior-guests,  with  shade  and  form 
Of  witch,  and  demon,  and  large  coffin-worm. 
Were  long  be-nightmar'd.     Angela  the  old 
Died  palsy-twitch'd,  with  meagre  face  deform; 
The  Beadsman,  after  thousand  aves  told. 
For  aye  unsought  for  slept  among  his  ashes  cold.* 

The  last  of  the  trio  of  Keats^s  tales  in  verse,  Lamiay 
owed  its  origin,  and  perhaps  part  of  its  temper,  to  his 
readings  in  Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy.  His  own 
experiences  under  the  stings  of  love  and  jealousy  had 

*  A  critic,  not  often  so  in  error,  has  contended  that  the  death  of  the 
beadsman  and  Angela  in  the  concluding  stanza  are  due  to  the  exigencies 
of  rime.  On  the  contrary,  they  are  foreseen  from  the  first:  that  of  the 
beadsman  in  the  lines, 

But  no — already  had  his  death-bell  rung; 
The  joys  of  all  his  life  were  said  and  sung; 

that  of  Angela  where  she  calls  herself 

A  poor,  weak,  palsy-stricken,  churchyard  thing. 
Whose  passing  bell  may  ere  the  midnight  toll. 

The  touch  of  flippant  realism  which  Keats  had,  again  to  Woodhouse's 
distress,  proposed  to  throw  into  his  story  at  this  point  was  as  follows.  For 
the  four  last  lines  of  the  last  stanza  Keats  had  proposed  to  write, — 

Angela  went  off 
Twitch'd  with  the  palsv:  and  with  face  deform 
The  beadsman  stiffened,  'twixt  a  sigh  and  laugh 
Ta'en  sudden  from  his  beads  by  one  weak  little  cough. 

In  printing  the  poem  Keats,  probably  at  the  instance  of  Taylor  and  Wood- 
house,  reverted  to  the  earlier  and  better  version. 


SOURCES:    AND  A  COMPARISON        405 

led  him,  during  those  spring  months  of  1819  when  he 
could  write  nothing,  to  pore  much  over  the  treatise  of 
that  prodigiously  read,  satiric  old  commentator  on  the 
maladies  of  the  human  mind  and  body,  and  especially 
over  those  sections  of  it  which  deal  with  the  cause  and 
cure  of  love-melancholy.  Entertainment  in  abundance, 
information  in  cartloads,  Keats  could  draw  from  the 
matter  accumulated  and  glossed  by  Burton,  but  Httle 
or  nothing  to  gladden  or  soothe  or  fortify  him.  One 
story,  however,  he  found  which  struck  his  imagination 
so  much  that  he  was  moved  to  write  upon  it,  and  that 
was  the  old  Greek  story,  quoted  by  Biuiion  from  Philo- 
stratus,  of  Lamia  the  serpent-lady,  at  once  witch  and 
victim  of  witchcraft,  who  loved  a  youth  of  Corinth  and 
lived  with  him  in  a  palace  of  deHghts  built  by  her 
magic,  untn  their  happiness  was  shattered  by  the  scrutiny 
of  intrusive  and  coldblooded  wisdom. 

In  June  1819,  soon  after  the  inspiration  which  pro- 
duced the  Odes  had  passed  away,  and  before  he  left 
Hampstead  for  the  Isle  of  Wight,  Keats  made  a  be- 
ginning on  this  new  task;  continued  it  at  intervals, 
concurrently  with  his  attempts  in  drama,  at  ShankHn 
and  Winchester;  and  finished  it  by  the  first  week  in 
September.  It  happened  that  Thomas  Love  Peacock 
had  published  the  year  before  a  tale  in  verse  on  a  nearly 
similar  theme, — ^that  of  the  beautiful  ThessaMan  en- 
chantress Rhododaphne:  one  wonders  whether  Keats 
may  not  have  felt  in  Peacock's  attempt  a  challenge 
and  stimulus  to  his  own.  Peacock's  work,  now  unduly 
neglected,  is  that  of  an  accomplished  scholar  and 
craftsman  sitting  down  to  teU  an  old  Greek  tale  of 
magic  in  the  form  of  narrative  verse  then  most  fashion- 
able, the  mixed  four-stressed  couplet  and  ballad  measure 
of  Scott  and  Bjo-on,  and  telling  it,  for  a  poet  not  of 
genius,  gracefully  and  well.  Whether  Keats's  Lamia  is 
a  work  of  genius  there  is  no  need  to  ask.  No  one  can 
deny  the  truth  of  his  own  criticism  of  it  when  he  says, 
'I  am  certain  there  is  that  sort  of  fire  in  it  which  must 
take  hold  of  people  in  some  way — ^give  them  either 


406  METRE  AND  QUALITY 

pleasant  or  unpleasant  sensation/  But  personally  I 
cannot  agree  with  the  opinion  of  the  late  Francis  Turner 
Palgrave  and  other  critics — I  think  they  are  the  majority 
— ^who  give  it  the  first  place  among  the  tales.  On  the 
contrary,  if  an  order  of  merit  among  them  there  must 
be,  I  should  put  it  third  and  lowest,  for  several  reasons 
of  detail  as  well  as  for  one  reason  affecting  the  whole 
design  and  composition. 
As  to  the  technical  qualities  of  the  poetry,  let  it  be 
/  granted  that  Keats's  handling  of  the  heroic  couplet, 
/  modelled  this  time  on  the  example  of  Dr^gn  and  not 
of  the  Elizabethans,  though  retaining  pleasant  traces 
i  of  the  Elizabethan  usages  of  the  over-run  or  enjambe- 
I  ment  and  the  varied  pause, — ^let  it  be  granted  that  his 
\  handling  of  this  mode  of  the  metre  is  masterly.  Let  it 
be  admitted  also  that  there  are  passages  in  the  narrative 
imagined  as  intensely  as  any  in  Isabella  or  The  Eve  of 
St  Agnes  and  told  quite  as  vividly  in  a  style  more  rapid 
and  condensed.  Such  is  the  passage,  in  the  introductory 
episode  which  fills  so  large  a  relative  place  in  the  poem, 
where  Mercury  woos  and  wins  his  wood-nymph  after 
Lamia  has  lifted  from  her  the  spell  of  invisibility.  Such 
is  the  gorgeous,  agonized  transformation  act  of  Lamia 
herself  from  serpent  to  woman:  such  again  the  scene 
of  her  waylaying  and  ensnaring  of  the  youth  on  his 
way  to  Corinth.  And  such  above  all  would  be  the 
whole  final  scene  of  the  banquet  and  its  break-up, 
from  'Soft  went  the  music  with  soft  air  along'  to  the 
end,  but  for  the  perplexing  apostrophe,  presently  to 
be  considered,  which  interrupts  it.  Still  counting  up 
the  things  in  the  poem  to  be  most  praised,  here  is  an 
example  where  the  poetry  of  Greek  mythology  is  very 
eloquently  woven  into  the  rhetoric  of  love: — 

Leave  thee  alone  I    Look  back !    Ah !  goddess,  see 

Whether  my  eyes  can  ever  turn  from  thee  I 

For  pity  do  not  this  sad  heart  belie — 

Even  as  thou  vanishest  so  I  shall  die. 

Stay  !  though  a  Naiad  of  the  rivers,  stay ! 

To  thy  far  wishes  will  thy  streams  obey: 


BEAUTIES  AND  FAULTS  407 

Stay !  though  the  greenest  woods  be  thy  domain. 
Alone  they  can  drink  up  the  morning  rain : 
Though  a  descended  Pleiad,  will  not  one 
Of  thine  harmonious  sisters  keep  in  tune 
Thy  spheres,  and  as  thy  silver  proxy  shine  ? 

And  here  a  beautiful  instance  of  power  and  justness  in 
scenic  imagination: — 

As  men  talk  in  a  dream,  so  Corinth  all. 
Throughout  her  palaces  imperial. 
And  all  her  populous  streets  and  temples  lewd, 
Mutter'd,  like  tempest  in  the  distance  brew'd. 
To  the  wide-spreaded  night  above  her  towers. 
Men,  women,  rich  and  poor,  in  the  cool  hours. 
Shuffled  their  sandals  o'er  the  pavement  white, 
Companion'd  or  alone;  while  many  a  light 
Flar'd  here  and  there,  from  wealthy  festivals. 
And  threw  their  moving  shadows  on  the  walls. 
Or  found  them  cluster'd  in  the  cornic'd  shade 
Of  some  arch'd  temple  door,  or  dusty  colonnade. 

Turning  now  to  the  other  side  of  the  account:  for 
one  thing,  we  find  jarring  and  disappointing  notes,  such 
as  had  disappeared  from  Keats 's  works  since  Endymiorij 
of  the  old  tasteless  manner  of  the  Hunt-taught  days: 
for  instance  the  unpalatable  passage  in  the  first  book 
beginning  'Let  the  mad  poets  say  whatever  they  please/ 
and  worse  stni,  with  a  new  note  of  idle  cynicism  added, 
the  lines  about  love  which  open  the  second  book. 
Misplaced  archaisms  also  reappear,  such  as  'unshent' 
and  the  participle  'daft,'  from  the  obsolete  verb  'daff/ 
used  as  though  it  meant  to  puzzle  or  daze;  with  bad 
verbal  coinages  like  'piazzian/  'psalterian.'  Moreover, 
though  many  things  in  the  poem  are  potently  conceived, 
others  are  not  so.  The  description  of  the  magical  palace- 
hall  is  surely  a  failure,  except  for  the  one  fine  note  in 
the  lines, — 

A  haunting  music,  sole  perhaps  and  lone 
Supporters  of  the  faery-roof,  made  moan 
Throughout,  as  fearful  the  whole  charm  might  fade. 

The  details  of  the  structure,  with  its  pairs  of  palms  and 


408  PERPLEXING  MORAL 

plantains  carved  in  cedar-wood,  its  walls  lined  with 
mirrors,  its  panels  which  change  magically  from  plain 
marble  to  jasper,  its  fifty  censers  and  'Twelve  sphered 
tables,  by  twelve  seats  insphered,' — all  this  seems 
feebly  and  even  tastelessly  invented  in  comparison  with 
the  impressive  dream-architecture  in  some  of  Keats's 
other  poems:  I  will  even  go  farther,  and  say  that  it 
scarce  holds  its  own  against  the  not  much  dissimilar 
magic  hall  in  the  sixth  canto  of  Rhododaphne. 

But  the  one  fimdamental  flaw  in  Lamia  concerns  its 
moral.  The  word  is  crude:  what  I  mean  is  the  bewilder- 
ment in  which  it  leaves  us  as  to  the  effect  intended  to 
be  made  on  our  imaginative  sympathies.  Lamia  is  a 
serpent-woman,  baleful  and  a  witch,  whose  love  for 
Lycius  fills  him  with  momentary  happiness  but  must, 
we  are  made  aware,  be  fatal  to  him.  ApoUonius  is  a 
philosopher  who  sees  through  her  and  by  one  steadfast 
look  withers  up  her  magic  semblance  and  destroys  her, 
but  in  doing  so  fails  to  save  his  pupil,  who  dies  the 
moment  his  illusion  vanishes.  Are  these  things  a  bitter 
parable,  meaning  that  all  love-joys  are  but  deception, 
and  that  at  the  touch  of  wisdom  and  experience  they 
melt  away?  If  so,  the  tale  might  have  been  told  either 
tragically  or  satirically,  in  either  case  leaving  the  reader 

-.^  impartial  as  between  the  sage  and  his  victim.    But 
Keats  in  this  apostrophe,  which  I  wish  he  had  left  out, 

^ — deliberately  points  a  moral  and  expressly  invites  us  to 
take  sides: — 

What  wreath  for  Lamia  ?    What  for  Lycius  ? 
What  for  the  sage,  old  ApoUonius  ? 
Upon  her  aching  forehead  be  there  hung 
The  leaves  of  willow  and  of  adder's  tongue; 
And  for  the  youth,  quick,  let  us  strip  for  him 
The  thyrsus,  that  his  watching  eyes  may  swim 
Into  forgetfulness;  and,  for  the  sage. 
Let  spear-grass  and  the  spiteful  thistle  wage 
War  on  his  temples.     Do  not  all  charms  fly 
At  the  mere  touch  of  cold  philosophy  ? 
There  was  an  awful  rainbow  once  in  heaven: 
We  know  her  woof,  her  texture;  she  is  given 


THE  SAGE  DENOUNCED:    WHY?        409 

In  the  dull  catalogue  of  common  things. 
Philosophy  will  clip  an  Angel's  wings, 
Conquer  all  mysteries  by  rule  and  line. 
Empty  the  haunted  air,  and  gnomed  mine — 
Unweave  a  rainbow,  as  it  erewhile  made 
The  tender-person'd  Lamia  melt  into  a  shade. 

These  lines  to  my  mind  have  not  only  the  fault  of 
breaking  the  story  at  a  critical  point  and  anticipating 
its  issue,  but  challenge  the  mind  to  untimely  question- 
ings and  reflections.  The  wreaths  of  ominous  growth 
distributed  to  each  of  the  three  personages  may  symbolize 
the  general  tragedy:  but  why  are  we  asked  to  take 
sides  with  the  enchantress,  ignoring  everything  about 
her  except  her  charm,  and  against  the  sage  ?  If  she  were 
indeed  a  thing  of  bale  under  a  mask  of  beauty,  was  not 
the  friend  and  tutor  bound  to  immask  her?  and  if  the 
pupil  could  not  survive  the  loss  of  his  illusion, — ^if  he 
could  not  confront  the  facts  of  life  and  build  up  for 
himself  a  new  happiness  on  a  surer  foundation, — ^was 
it  not  better  that  he  should  be. let  perish?  Is  there 
not  in  all  this  a  slackening  of  imaginative  and  intellec- 
tual grasp?  And  especially  as  to  the  last  lines,  do 
we  not  feel  that  they  are  but  a  cheap  and  imiQumi- 
nating  repetition  of  a  rather  superficial  idea,  the 
idea  phrased  shortly  in  Campbell's  Rainbow  and  at 
length  in  several  well-known  passages  of  Wordsworth's 
Excursion,  particularly  that  in  the  fifth  book  beginning — 

Ambitious  spirits ! — 
Whom  earth,  at  this  late  season,  hath  produced 
To  regulate  the  moving  spheres,  and  weigh 
The  planets  in  the  hollow  of  their  hand; 
And  they  who  rather  dive  than  soar,  whose  pains 
Have  solved  the  elements,  or  analysed 
The  thinking  principle — shall  they  in  fact 
Prove  a  degraded  Race  ? 

Wordsworth  had  twenty  years  earlier  written  more 
wisely,  *  Poetry  is  the  impassioned  expression  in  the 
eyes  of  all  science.'  The  latter-day  Wordsworth,  and 
Keats  after  him,  should  have  realised  that  the  dis- 
coveries of  'philosophy,'  meaning  science,  create  new 


410  COMMENTS  OF  LEIGH  HUNT 

mysteries  while  they  solve  the  old,  and  leave  the  world 
as  full  of  poetry  as  they  found  it:  poetry,  it  may 
be,  with  its  point  of  view  shifted,  poetry  of  a  new 
kind,  but  none  the  less  poetical.  Leigh  Hunt,  in  his 
review  of  Lamia  published  on  the  appearance  of  the 
volimie,  has  some  remarks  partly  justifying  and  partly 
impugning  Keats's  treatment  of  the  story  in  this 
respect: — 

Mr  Keats  has  departed  as  much  from  common-place  in  the 
character  and  moral  of  this  story,  as  he  has  in  the  poetry  of  it. 
He  would  see  fair  play  to  the  serpent,  and  makes  the  power  of 
the  philosopher  an  ill-natured  and  disturbing  thing.  Lamia 
though  liable  to  be  turned  into  painful  shapes  had  a  soul  of 
humanity;  and  the  poet  does  not  see  why  she  should  not  have 
her  pleasures  accordingly,  merely  because  a  philosopher  saw 
that  she  was  not  a  mathematical  truth.  This  is  fine  and  good. 
It  is  vindicating  the  greater  philosophy  of  poetry. 

So  far,  this  is  a  manifest  piece  of  special  pleading  by 
Hunt  on  Lamia^s  behalf.  If  she  is  nothing  worse  than 
a  being  with  a  soul  of  humanity  liable  to  be  turned 
into  painful  shapes,  why  must  ApoUonius  feel  it  his 
duty  to  wither  and  destroy  her  for  the  safeguarding  of 
his  pupil,  even  at  the  cost  of  that  pupil's  life?  Her 
witchcraft  must  consist  in  something  much  worse  than 
not  being  a  mathematical  truth,  else  why  is  he  her  so 
bitter  enemy?  Hunt  proceeds,  more  to  the  purpose, 
to  protest  against  the  poet's  implication — 

that  modern  experiment  has  done  a  deadly  thing  to  poetry  by 
discovering  the  nature  of  the  rainbow,  the  air,  etc.,  that  is  to 
say,  that  the  knowledge  of  natural  history  and  physics,  by 
shewing  us  the  nature  of  things,  does  away  with  the  imaginations 
that  once  adorned  them.  This  is  a  condescension  to  a  learned 
vulgarism,  which  so  excellent  a  poet  as  Mr  Keats  ought  not  to 
have  made.  The  world  will  always  have  fine  poetry,  so  long  as 
it  has  events,  passions,  affections,  and  a  philosophy  that  sees 
deeper  than  this  philosophy.  There  will  be  a  poetry  of  the  heart, 
so  long  as  there  are  tears  and  smiles:  there  will  be  a  poetry  of 
the  imagination,  as  long  as  the  first  causes  of  things  remain  a 
mystery.  A  man  who  is  no  poet,  may  think  he  is  none,  as  soon 
as  he  finds  out  the  physical  cause  of  the  rainbow;  but  he  need 
not  alarm  himself: — he  was  none  before.    The  true  poet  will  go 


THE  ODES:    TO  PSYCHE  411 

deeper.  He  will  ask  himself  what  is  the  cause  of  that  physical 
cause;  whether  truths  to  the  senses  are  after  all  to  be  taken  as 
truths  to  the  imagination;  and  whether  there  is  not  room  and 
mystery  enough  in  the  universe  for  the  creation  of  infinite  things, 
when  the  poor  matter-of-fact  philosopher  has  come  to  the  end  of 
his  own  vision. 

In  Endymion  Keats  had  impeded  and  confused  his 
narrative  by  working  into  it  much  incident  and  imagery 
symbolic  of  the  cogitations  and  aspirations,  the  up- 
lif tings  and  misgivings,  of  his  own  unripe  spirit.  Three 
years  later,  writing  to  Shelley  from  his  sickbed,  he 
contrasts  that  former  state  of  his  mind  with  its  present 
state,  saying  that  it  was  then  like  a  scattered  pack  of 
cards  but  is  now  sorted  to  a  pip.  The  three  tales  just 
discussed,  written  in  the  interval,  show  how  quickly 
the  power  of  sorting  and  controlling  his  imaginations 
had  matured  itself  in  him.  In  them  he  is  already  an 
artist  standing  outside  of  his  own  conceptions,  certain 
of  his  own  aim  in  dealing  with  them  (subject  perhaps 
to  some  reservation  in  the  case  of  Lamia),  and  scarcely 
letting  his  personal  self  intrude  upon  his  narrative  at 
all  to  complicate  or  distract  it. 

For  the  expression  of  his  private  moods  and  medita- 
tions he  had  perfected  during  the  same  interval  a  new 
and  beautiful  vehicle  in  the  ode.  He  had  been  accus- 
tomed to  try  his  hand  at  odes,  or  what  he  called  such, 
from  his  earliest  riming  days:  and  odes  also,  to  all 
intents  and  purposes,  are  the  two  great  lyrics  in  Endy- 
mion, the  choral  hymn  to  Pan  and  the  song  of  the 
Indian  maiden  to  Sorrow.  But  those  which  he  com- 
posed in  quick  succession,  as  we  have  seen,  in  the  late 
spring  of  1819  are  of  a  reflective  and  meditative  type, 
new  in  his  work  and  highly  personal. 

That  which  I  have  shown  reason  for  believing  to  be 
the  earliest  of  the  group,  the  Ode  to  Psyche  written  in 
the  last  days  of  April,  differs  somewhat  from  the  rest 
both  in  form  and  spirit.  Its  strophes  are  longer  and 
more  irregular:  its  strain  less  inward  and  brooding, 
with  more  of  lyric  ardour  and  exaltation.     It  tells  of 


412     SOURCES:    BURTON  AND  APULEIUS 

the  poet's  delight  in  that  late,  exquisitely  and  spirit- 
ually symbolic  product  of  the  mythologic  spirit  of  ex- 
piring paganism,  the  story  of  Cupid  and  Psyche.  What 
may  have  especially  turned  his  attention  to  this  fable 
at  that  moment  we  cannot  tell.  Possibly  the  mention 
of  it  in  Burton's  Anatomy  may  have  set  him  on  to  read- 
ing the  original  source,  the  Golden  Ass  of  Apuleius, 
in  Adlington's  translation:  there  are  passages  in 
Lamia  which  suggest  such  a  reading,^  and  the  noble, 
rhythmical  English  of  that  Elizabethan  version,  loose 
as  it  may  be  in  point  of  scholarship,  could  not  fail  to 
charm  his  ear.  Or  possibly  recent  study  of  the  plates 
in  the  Musee  Napoleon  (as  to  which  more  by  and  by) 
may  have  brought  freshly  to  his  memory  the  sculptured 
group  in  which  the  story  is  embodied.  But  that  he 
had  always  loved  the  story  we  know  from  the  passage 
'I  stood  tip-toe'  beginning — 

So  felt  he,  who  first  told  how  Psyche  went 
On  the  smooth  wind  to  realms  of  wonderment, 

as  well  as  from  his  confession  that  in  boyhood  he  used 
to  admire  its  languid  and  long-drawn  romantic  treat- 
ment in  the  poem  of  Mrs  Tighe. 

Cloying  touches  of  languor,  such  as  often  disfigure 
his  own  earlier  work,  are  not  wanting  in  the  opening 
lines  in  which  he  tells  how  he  came  upon  the  fabled 
couple  in  a  dream,  but  are  more  than  compensated  by 
the  charm  of  the  scene  where  he  finds  them  reposing, 
'Mid  hush'd,  cool-rooted  flowers  fragrant-eyed.'  What 
other  poet  has  compressed  into  a  single  line  so  much 
of  the  essential  virtue  of  flowers,  of  their  power  to 
minister  to  the  spirit  of  man  through  all  his  senses  at 
once?    Such  felicity  in  compoimd  epithets  is  by  this 

*  May  the  following  be  counted  evidence  to  the  same  effect  ?  The  old 
woman  in  AvuLeius,  chap,  xxi,  just  as  she  is  about  to  tell  her  daughter 
the  story  of  Cupid  and  Psyche,  says, '  as  the  visions  of  the  day  are  accounted 
false  and  untrue,  so  the  visions  of  the  night  do  often  chance  contrary.' 
Compare  Keats  at  the  end  of  the  Ode  on  Indolence: — 

Farewell !    I  yet  have  visions  for  the  night, 
And  for  the  day  faint  visions  there  is  store. 


QUALITIES:    A  QUESTIONABLE  CLAIM    413 

time  habitual  with  Keats;  and  of  Spenser  with  his 
^sea-shouldering  whales'  he  is  now  more  than  the 
equal.  The  ^azure-lidded  sleep'  of  the  maiden  in  St 
Agnes^  Eve  is  matched  in  this  ode  by  the  ^  sof t-conched 
ear'  of  Psyche, — though  the  compound  is  perhaps  a  little 
forced  and  odd,  like  the  'cirque-couchant'  snake  in 
Lamia.  The  invocation  in  the  third  and  fourth  stanzas 
expresses,  with  the  fullest  reach  of  Keats's  fehcity  in 
style  and  a  singular  freshness  and  fire  of  music  in  the 
verse,  both  his  sense  of  the  meaning  of  Greek  nature- 
rehgion  and  his  delight  in  imagining  the  beauty  of  its 
shrines  and  ritual.  For  the  rest,  there  seems  at  first 
something  strained  in  the  turn  of  thought  and  expres- 
sion whereby  the  poet  offers  himself  and  the  homage 
of  his  own  mind  to  the  divinity  he  addresses,  in  Heu  of 
the  worship  of  antiquity  for  which  she  came  too  late; 
and  especially  in  the  terms  of  the  metaphor  which  opens 
the  famous  fourth  stanza: — 

Yes,  I  will  be  thy  priest,  and  build  a  fane 
In  some  untrodden  region  of  my  mind, 

Where  branched  thoughts,  new-blown  with  pleasant  pain. 
Instead  of  pines  shall  mm-mur  in  the  wind. 

But  in  a  moment  we  are  carried  beyond  criticism  by 
that  incomparable  distiQation  of  one,  or  many,  of  his 
impressions  among  the  Lakes  or  in  Scotland, — 

Far,  far  around  shall  those  dark-cluster'd  trees 
Fledge  the  wild-ridged  mountains  steep  by  steep. 

For  such  a  master-stroke  of  concentrated  imaginative 
description  no  praise,  much  as  has  been  showered  on 
it  by  Ruskin  and  lesser  critics,  can  be  too  great. 

Keats  declares  to  his  brother  that  this  is  the  first  of 
his  poems  with  which  he  has  taken  even  moderate 
pains.  That  being  so,  it  is  remarkable  that  he  should 
have  let  stand  in  it  as  many  as  three  unrimed  line- 
endings:  and  what  the  poem  truly  bears  in  upon  the 
reader  is  a  sense  less  of  special  care  and  finish  than  of 
special  glow  and  ardour,  till  he  is  left  breathless  and 
delighted  at  the  threshold  of  the  sanctuary  prepared 


414  ON  INDOLENCE 

by  the  'gardener  Fancy/  his  mind  enthralled  by  the 
imagery  and  his  ear  by  the  verse,  with  its  swift,  mounting 
music  and  rich,  vehemently  iterated  assonances  towards 
the  close: — 

A  rosey  sanctuary  will  I  dress 

With  the  wreath'd  trellis  of  a  working  brain, 

With  buds,  and  bells,  and  stars  without  a  name. 
With  all  the  gardener  Fancy  e'er  could  feign. 

With  breeding  flowers,  will  never  breed  the  same; 
And  thither  will  I  bring  all  soft  delights 

That  shadowy  thought  can  win, 
A  bright  torch,  and  a  casement  ope  at  nights. 

To  let  the  warm  Love  in ! 

The  four  remaining  spring  odes  are  slower-paced,  as 
becomes  their  more  musing  tenour,  and  are  all  written 
in  a  succession  of  stanzas  repeated  uniformly  or  with 
slight  variations.  Throughout  them  all  each  stanza  is 
of  ten  lines  and  five  rimes,  the  first  and  second  rimes 
arranged  in  a  quatrain,  the  third,  fourth  and  fifth  in  a 
sestet:  the  order  of  rimes  in  the  sestet  varying  in  the 
different  odes,  and  in  one,  the  nightingale  ode,  the 
third  line  from  the  end  being  shortened  so  as  to  have 
three  stresses  instead  of  five. 

Let  us  take  first  the  two  in  which  the  imagery  has 
been  suggested  to  the  poet  by  works  of  Greek  sculpture 
whether  seen  or  imagined.  In  the  Ode  on  Indolence 
Keats  merely  revives  his  memory  of  a  special  type  of 
Greek  marble  urn  where  draped  figures  of  women, 
Seasons,  it  may  be,  or  priestesses,  walk  with  joined 
hands  behind  a  solemn  Bacchus,  or  priest  in  the  god's 
guise  (see  Plate  viii,  p.  342), — ^he  merely  evokes  this 
memory  in  order  to  describe  the  way  in  which  certain 
symbolic  personages  have  seemed  in  a  day-dream  to 
pass  before  him  and  re-pass  and  again  re-pass,  appearing 
and  disappearing  as  the  embossed  figures  on  such  an 
urn  may  be  made  to  do  by  turning  it  round.  From 
the  'man  and  two  women'  of  the  March  letter  they  are 
changed  to  three  women,  whom  at  first  he  does  not 
recognize;    but  seeing  presently  who  they  are,  namely 


ON  A  GRECIAN   URN  415 

Love,  Ambition,  and  that  'maiden  most  unmeek/  his 
'demon  Poesy/  he  for  a  moment  longs  for  wings  to 
follow  and  overtake  them.  The  longing  passes,  and  in 
his  relaxed  mood  he  feels  that  none  of  the  three  holds 
any  joy  for  him — 

so  sweet  as  drowsy  noons. 
And  evenings  steeped  in  honey'd  indolence. 

They  come  by  once  more,  and  again,  barely  aroused 
from  the  sweets  of  outdoor  slumber  and  the  spring  after- 
noon, he  will  not  so  much  as  lift  his  head  from  where 
he  lies,  but  bids  them  farewell  and  sees  them  depart 
without  a  tear. 

Keats  did  not  print  this  ode,  thinking  it  perhaps  not 
good  enough  or  else  too  intimately  personal.  But 
writing  to  Miss  Jeffrey  a  few  weeks  after  it  was  com- 
posed, he  tells  her  it  is  the  thing  he  has  most  enjoyed 
writing  this  year.  It  is  indeed  a  pleasant,  lovingly 
meditated  revival  and  casting  into  verse  of  the  imagery 
which  had  come  freshly  into  his  mind  when  he  wrote 
to  his  brother  of  his  fit  of  languor  in  the  previous  March. 
It  contains  some  powerful  and  many  exquisite  lines, 
but  only  one  perfect  stanza,  the  fifth:  and  there  are 
slacknesses — shall  we  say  lazinesses — ^in  the  execution, 
as  where  the  need  for  rimes  to  'noons'  and  'indolence' 
prompts  the  ail-too  commonplace  prayer — 

That  I  may  never  know  how  change  the  moons. 
Or  hear  the  voice  of  busy  common-sense; 

or  where,  thinking  contemptuously  of  the  old  'inter- 
coronation'  days  with  Leigh  Hunt,  he  declines,  in  truly 
Cockney  rime,  to  raise  his  head  from  the  flowery  grass 
in  order  to  be  fed  with  praise  and  become  'a  pet-lamb 
in  a  sentimental /arce.' 

In  bidding  the  phantoms  of  this  day-dream  adieu, 
Keats  avows  that  there  are  others  yet  haunting  him, 
and  while  imagery  drawn  from  the  sculptures  on  Greek 
vases  was  still  floating  through  his  mind,  he  was  able 
to  rouse  himself  to  a  stronger  effort  and  produce  a  true 
masterpiece  in  his  famous  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn.    It 


416  SOURCES:    A  COMPOSITE 

is  no  single  oi^  actually  existing  specimen  of  Attic  handi- 
craft that  he  celebrates  in  this  ode,  but  a  composite 
conjured  up  instinctively  in  his  mind  out  of  several  such 
known  to  him  in  reality  or  from  engravings.  During 
and  after  those  hour-loiig  silent  reveries  among  the 
museum  marbles  of  which  Severn  tells  us,  the  creative 
spirit  within  him  will  have  been  busy  almost  unaware 
combining  such  images  and  re-combining  them.  Criticism 
can  plausibly  analyse  this  creation  into  its  several 
elements.  In  calling  the  scene  a  'leaf-fringed  legend' 
Keats  will  have  remembered  that  the  necks  and  shoulders 
of  this  kind  of  urn  are  regularly  encircled  by  bands  of 
leaf-pattern  ornament.  The  idea  of  a  sacrifice  and  a 
Bacchic  dance  being  figured  together  in  one  frieze,  a  thing 
scarcely  elsewhere  to  be  found,  will  have  come  to  him 
from  the  well  known  vase  of  Sosibios  (so  called  from 
the  name  of  the  sculptor  inscribed  upon  it),  from  the 
print  of  which  in  the  Musee  Napoleon  there  actually 
exists  a  tracing  by  his  hand.^  But  this  is  a  serene  and 
ceremonial  composition:  for  the  timiult  and  'wild 
ecstasy'  of  his  imagined  frieze,  the  'pipes  and  timbrels,' 
the  'mad  pursuit,'  he  will  have  had  store  of  visions 
ready  in  his  mind,  from  the  Bacchanal  pictures  of 
Poussin,  no  doubt  also  from  Bacchic  vases  like  that  fine 
one  in  the  Townley  collection  at  the  British  Museum 
and  the  nearly  allied  Borghese  vase:    while  for  the 

— ^heifer  lowing  at  the  skies 
And  all  her  silken  flanks  in  garlands  drest, 

*  The  Musee  Napoleon  is  a  set  of  four  volumes  illustrating  with  outline 
engravings  the  works  of  classic  art  collected  by  Napoleon  Bonaparte  as 
spoils  of  war  and  brought  to  Paris.  Keats's  original  tracing  from  the 
Sosibios  vase  was  in  the  collection  of  Sir  Charles  Dilke  and  is  reproduced 
on  the  frontispiece  of  the  Clarendon  Press  edition  of  Keats's  poems,  1906. 
The  subject  has  been  much  discussed,  but  only  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  classical  archaeologist,  which  ignores  the  part  played  by  paintings  as  well 
as  antiques  in  stimulating  Keats's  imagination.  From  that  point  of  view 
the  nearest  approach,  as  I  hold,  to  a  right  solution  is  set  out  m  a  paper  by 
Paul  Wolters,  in  Archiv  fur  das  Studium  der  neueren  Sprachen,  Band  xx, 
Heft  1/2:  Braunschweig;  though  I  think  he  is  too  positive  in  ruhng  out 
Roman  representations  of  the  Suovetaurilia  such  as  the  fine  urn  at  Holland 
House  suggested  as  Keats's  source  by  the  late  Mr  A.  S.  Murray  and  repro- 
duced in  The  Odes  of  Keats,  by  A.  C.  Downer,  M.A.  (Oxford,  1897). 


THE  SOSIBIOS  VASE 

PROFILE  AND   FRIEZE'.   FROM   ENGRAVINGS  IN  THE   MUSEE   NAPOLEON 


SPHERES  OF  ART  AND  LIFE  CONTRASTED    417 

as  well  as  for  the  thought  of  the  pious  morn  and  the 
Httle  town  emptied  of  its  folk  that  old  deep  impression 
received  from  Claude's  ^Sacrifice  to  Apollo'  will  have 
been  reinforced  by  others  from  works  of  sculpture  easy 
to  guess  at:  most  of  all,  naturally,  from  the  sacrificial 
processions  in  the  Parthenon  frieze. 

In  the  ode  we  read  how  the  sculptiu-ed  forms  of  such 
an  imaginaiy  antique,  visualized  in  full  intensity  before 
his  mind's  eye,  have  set  his  thoughts  to  work,  on  the 
one  hand  asking  himseK  what  Hving,  human  scenes  of 
ancient  custom  and  worship  lay  behind  them,  and  on 
the  other  hand  speculating  upon  the  abstract  relations 
of  plastic  art  to  life.     The  opening  invocation  is  followed  V^/fil 
&y  a  strmg  ol  questions  which  flash  their  own  answei^*  IM^  T 
upon  us — ^interrogatories  which  are  at  the  same  time 
pictures, — -^Vhat  men  or  gods  are  these,  what  maidens 
loth?'  etc.t^The  second  and  third  stanzas  express  with  . 
fuQ  feHcity  and  insight  the  differences  between  life,  which  jl 
pays  for  its  unique  prerogative  of  reality  by  satiety  and  1 1 
decay,  and  art,  which  in  forfeiting  reality  gains  in  ex- I  \ 
change  permanence  of  beauty,  and  the  power  to  charm  I   \ 
by  imagined  experiences  even  richer  than  the  real.    The      1 
thought  thi'own  by  Leonardo  da  Vinci  into  a  single  line      \ 
— 'Cosa  bella  mortal  passa  e  non  d'arte' — and  expanded       I 
by  Wordsworth  in  his  later  days  into  the  sonnet, '  Praised 
be  the  art,'  etc.,  finds  here  its  most  perfect  utterance. 

Ah,  happy,  happy  boughs !  that  cannot  shed 

Your  leaves,  nor  ever  bid  the  Spring  adieu; 
And,  happy  melodist,  unwearied. 

For  ever  piping  songs  for  ever  new; 
More  happy  love  I  more  happy,  happy  love  I 

For  ever  warm  and  still  to  be  enjoy'd. 
For  ever  panting,  and  for  ever  young; 
All  breathing  human  passion  far  above. 

That  leaves  a  heart  high-sorrowful  and  cloyM, 
A  burning  forehead,  and  a  parching  tongue. 

Then  the  questioning  begins  again,  and  again  conjures 
up  a  choice  of  pictures, — 

What  little  town  by  river  or  sea  shore. 
Or  mountain  built  with  peaceful  citadel. 
Is  emptied  of  its  folk,  this  pious  morn  ? 


418   PLAY  BETWEEN  THE  TWO  SPHERES 

In  the  answering  lines  of  the  sestet — 

And,  little  town,  thy  streets  for  evermore 
Will  silent  be;  and  not  a  soul  to  tell 

Why  thou  art  desolate,  can  e'er  return, — 

in  these  lines  we  find  that  the  poet's  imagination  has 
suddenly  and  lightly  shifted  its  ground,  and  chooses  to 
view  the  arrest  of  life  as  though  it  were  an  infliction^ia 
the  sphere  of  reality,  and  not  merely,  like  the  instances 
of  such  arrest  given  farther  back,  a  necessary  conditie» 
in  the  sphere  of  art,  having  in  that  sphere  its  own  com- 
pensations. Finally,  dropping  such  airy  play  of  the 
mind  backward  and  forward  between  the  two  spheres, 
he  consigns  the  work  of  ancient  skill  to  the  future,  to 
remain, — 

in  midst  of  other  woe 
Than  ours,  a  friend  to  man,  to  whom  thou  say'st. 
Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty, — 

thus  re-asserting  his  old  doctrine,  ^Wliat-the  imagina- 
tion seizes  as  beauty  mu^  be  truth';  a  doctrine  which 
amidst^^the^popings"  of  reason"and  the  flux  of  things 
is  to  the  poet  and  artist — ^at  least  to  one  of  Keats's 
temper — the  one  anchorage  to  which  his  soul  can  and 
needs  must  cleave. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  the  second  pair — ^for  as  such  I 
regard  them — of  odes  written  in  May-tune,  those  To  a 
Nightingale  and  On  Melancholy.  Like  the  Ode  on  Indo- 
lence, the  nightingale  ode  begins  with  the  confession 
of  a  mood  of  'drowsy  numbness,'  but  this  time  one 
deeper  and  nearer  to  pain  and  heartache.  Then  in- 
voking the  nightingale,  the  poet  attributes  his  mood 
not  to  envy  of  her  song  (perhaps,  as  Mr  Bridges  has 
suggested,  there  may  be  here  an  under-reminiscence 
from  William  Browne  0,  but  to  excess  of  happiness  in 
it.    Just  as  his  Grecian  urn  was  no  single  specimen  of 

*  Sweet  Philomela  (then  he  heard  her  sing) 
I  do  not  envy  thy  sweet  carolling, 
But  do  admire  thee  each  even  and  morrow 
Canst  carelessly  thus  sing  away  thy  sorrow. 


^^Lyi  ^^^^K ' '  ^^^BH^JwB^^^i^'^'^^iHH 

H  ^            ^^«^1 «« 

^1      *4  vliSfe. 

^r  .'^     "''^^^i! 

i                  9^             ^^'-^^   ^    ;;^                       v»  , 

i?  ,,^^rir^'' 

:^»>^^H^^t 

^ir""^ 

w 


'«J 


o   o 


h  H 

s  s 

o  o 

ai  a£ 


THE  NIGHTINGALE  ODE  419 

antiquity  that  he  had  seen,  so  it  is  not  the  particular 
nightingale  he  had  heard  singing  in  the  Hampstead 
garden  that  Keats  thus  invokes,  but  a  type  of  the  race 
imagined  as  singing  in  some  far-off  scene  of  woodland 
mystery  and  beauty.  Thither  he  sighs  to  follow  her: 
first  by  aid  of  the  spell  of  some  southern  vintage — a 
spell  which  he  makes  us  realize  in  lines  redolent,  as  are 
none  others  in  our  language,  of  the  southern  richness 
and  joy  which  he  had  never  known  save  in  dreams. 
Then  follows  a  contrasted  vision  of  all  his  own  and  man- 
kind's tribulations  which  he  will  leave  behind  him^ 
Nay,  he  needs  not  the  aid  of  Bacchus, — Poetry  alone 
shall  transport  him.  For  a  moment  he  mistrusts  her 
power,  but  the  next  moment  finds  himself  where  he 
would  be,  listening  to  the  imagined  song  in  the  imagined 
woodland,  and  divining  in  the  darkness  all  the  secrets 
of  the  season  and  the  night.  While  thus  rapt  he 
remembers  how  often  the  thought  of  death  has 
seemed  welcome  to  him,  and  feels  that  it  would  be 
more  richly  welcome  now  than  ever.  The  nightin- 
gale would  not  cease  to  sing — and  by  this  time, 
though  he  calls  her  'immortal  bird,'  what  he  has  truly 
in  mind  is  not  the  song-bird  at  all,  but  the  bird-song, 
thought  of  as  though  it  were  a  thing  self-existing  and 
apart,  imperishable  through  the  ages.  So  thinking,  he 
contrasts  its  permanence  with  the  transitoriness  of 
human  life,  meaning  the  life  of  the  generations  of  indi- 
vidual men  and  women  who  have  listened  to  it.  This 
last  thought  leads  him  off  into  the  ages,  whence  he  brings 
back  those  memorable  touches  of  far-off  Bible  and 
legendary  romance  in  the  stanza  closing  with  the  words 
'in  faery  lands  forlorn':  and  then,  catching  up  his 
own  last  word,  'forlorn,'  with  an  abrupt  change  of 
mood  and  meaning,  he  returns  to  daily  consciousness, 
and  with  the  fading  away  of  his  forest  dream  the  poem 
closes. 

Throughout  this  ode  Keats's  genius  is  at  its  height. 
Imagination  cannot  be  more  rich  and  satisfying,  felicity 
or  phrase  and  cadence  camiot  be  more  absolute,  than 


^- 


420  ODE  ON  MELANCHOLY 

in  the  several  contrasted  stanzas  calling  for  the  draft 
of  southern  vintage,  picturing  the  frailty  and  wretched- 
ness of  man^s  estate  on  earth,  and  conjecturing  in  the 
'embalmed  darkness'  the  divers  odours  of  spring.  To 
praise  the  art  of  a  passage  like  that  in  the  fourth  stanza 
where  with  a  light,  lingering  pause  the  mind  is  carried 
instantaneously  away  from  the  miseries  of  the  world 
into  the  heart  of  the  imagined  forest, — ^to  praise  or 
comment  on  a  stroke  of  art  like  this  is  to  throw  doubt 
on  the  reader's  power  to  perceive  it  for  himself.  Let 
him  be  trusted  to  cherish  and  know  the  poem,  as  every 
lover  of  English  poetry  should,  Ho  its  depths,'  and  let 
us  go  on  to  the  last  product,  as  I  take  it  to  be,  of  this 
spring  month  of  inspiration,  and  that  is  the  Ode  on 
Melancholy. 

The  music  of  the  word — ^its  himdred  associations 
derived  from  the  early  seventeenth-century  poetry  in 
which  his  soul  was  steeped — ^foremost  among  them  no 
doubt  Milton's  U Allegro  and  II  Penseroso,  with  the 
beautiful  song  from  Fletcher's  Nice  Valour  which  in- 
spired them — ^his  recent  familiarity  with  Burton's 
Anatomy,  including  those  pithy  stanzas  of  alternate 
praise  and  repudiation  which  preface  it — all  these 
things  will  have  worked  together  with  Keats's  own 
haunting  and  deepest  mood  throughout  these  days  to 
set  him  composing  on  this  theme.  Melancholy.  He  had 
dallied  with  an  idea  of  doing  so  as  far  back  as  early  in 
March,  when  being  kept  from  writing  both  by  physical 
disinclination  and  a  temporary  phase  of  self-criticism, 
he  had  written  to  Haydon,  'I  will  not  spoil  my  gloom 
by  writing  an  ode  to  Darkness.'  Now  that  in  May  the 
springs  of  inspiration  were  again  unlocked  in  him,  such 
negative  purpose  fails  to  hold,  and  he  adds  this  ode  to 
the  rest,  throwing  into  it  some  of  his  most  splendid 
imagery  and  diction.  Its  temper  is  nearly  akin  on  the 
one  hand  to  some  of  the  gloomier  passages  in  his  letters 
to  Miss  Jeffrey  of  May  31  and  June  9,  and  on  the  other 
to  the  tragic  third  stanza  of  the  nightingale  ode.  Its 
main  purport  is  to  proclaim  the  spiritual  nearness,  the 


A  GRAND  CLOSE  421 

all  but  inseparablenesS;  of  joy  and  pain  in  human  experi- 
ence when  either  is  present  in  its  intensity.  One  of 
the  attributes,  it  will  be  remembered,  which  he  assigns 
to  his  enchantress  Lamia  is — 

a  sciential  brain 
To  imperplex  bliss  from  its  neighbour  pain. 

In  no  nature  have  the  sources  of  the  two  lain  deeper  or 
closer  together  than  in  his  own,  and  it  is  from  the  full- 
ness of  impassioned  experience  that  he  writes.  The 
real  melancholy,  he  insists,  is  not  that  which  belongs 
to  things  sad  or  direful  in  themselves.  Having  written 
two  stanzas  piHng  up  gruesome  images  of  such  things, 
and  discarded  on  reflection  the  former  and  more  grue- 
some of  the  two,  he  lets  the  second  stand,  and  goes  on, 
evoking  contrasted  images  of  opulent  beauty,  to  show 
how  the  true,  the  utter  melancholy  is  that  which  is 
inextricably  coupled  with  every  joy  and  resides  at  the 
heart  of  every  pleasure:   ending  magnificently — 

Ay,  in  the  very  temple  of  Delight 

Veiled  Melancholy  has  her  sovereign  shrine. 

Though  seen  of  none  save  him  whose  strenuous  tongue 
Can  burst  Joy's  grape  against  his  palate  fine; 
His  soul  shall  taste  the  sadness  of  her  might. 
And  be  among  her  cloudy  trophies  himg. 

One  more  ode  remains,  written  in  a  different  key  and 
after  a  lapse  of  some  four  months,  during  which  Keats 
had  been  away  in  the  coimtry,  quieted  by  absence  from 
the  object  of  his  passion  and  working  diligently  at  Otho 
the  Great  and  Lamia,  This  is  the  ode  To  Autumn.  He 
was  alone  at  Winchester,  rejoicing  in  perfect  September 
weather  and  in  a  mood  more  serene  and  contented  than 
he  had  known  for  long  or  was  ever  to  know  again.  '  How 
beautiful  the  season  is  now,'  he  writes  to  Reynolds, 
'how  fine  the  air — a  temperate  sharpness  about  it. 
Really,  without  joking,  chaste  weather — Dian  skies.  I 
never  liked  stubble  fields  so  much  as  now — aye,  better 
than  the  chilly  green  of  the  spring.  Somehow,  a  stubble 
plain  looks  warm,  in  the  same  way  that  some  pictures 
look  warm.    This  struck  me  so  much  in  my  Sunday's 


422  THE  LAST  OF  THE  ODES 

walk  that  I  composed  upon  it/  The  vein  in  which  he 
composed  is  one  of  simple  objectivity,  very  different 
from  the  passionate  and  complex  phases  of  introspective 
thought  and  feeling  which  inspired  the  spring  odes. 
The  result  is  the  most  Greek  thing,  except  the  fragment 
To  Maia,  which  Keats  ever  wrote.  It  opens  up  no 
such  far-reaching  avenues  to  the  mind  and  soul  of  the 
reader  as  the  odes  To  a  Grecian  Urn,  To  a  Nightingale, 
or  To  Melancholy,  but  in  execution  is  more  complete 
and  faultless  than  any  of  them.  Iiijhe  first  stanza  the 
boimty,  in  the  last  the  pensiveness,  of  the  tmie  are 
expressed  m  words  so  transparent  "and  direct^jhatwe' 


almost  forget  they  are  words  at  all,  and  natiu-e  herseli 
f^TiTtTFm  spason  seem  speaking  to  us:  while  in  the  middle 
stanza  the  touches  of  hterary  art  and  Greek  personifi- 
cation have  an  exquisite  congruity  and  ease.  Keats 
himself  has  hardly  anywhere  else  written  with  so  fine 
a  subtlety  of  nature-observation.  Students  of  form  will 
notice  a  slight  deviation  from  that  of  the  spring  odes, 
by  which  the  second  member  of  the  stanza  is  now  a 
septet  instead  of  a  sestet,  one  of  its  rimes  being  repeated 
three  tinies  instead  of  twice. 


Season  of  mists  and  mellow  fruitfulness, 
Close  bosom-friend  of  the  maturing  sun; 

Conspiring  with  him  how  to  load  and  bless 

With  fruit  the  vines  that  round  the  thatch-eaves  run; 

To  bend  with  apples  the  moss'd  cottage  trees. 
And  fill  all  fruit  with  ripeness  to  the  core; 

To  swell  the  gourd,  and  plump  the  hazel  shells 

With  a  sweet  kernel;  to  set  budding  more. 
And  still  more,  later  flowers  for  the  bees, 
Until  they  think  warm  days  will  never  cease. 

For  Summer  has  o'er-brimm'd  their  clammy  cells. 

Who  hath  not  seen  thee  oft  amid  thy  store  ? 

Sometimes  whoever  seeks  abroad  may  find 
Thee  sitting  careless  on  a  granary  floor. 

Thy  hair  soft-lifted  by  the  winnowing  wind; 
Or  on  a  half-reap'd  furrow  so  ind  asleep, 

Drows'd  with  the  fume  of  poppies,  while  thy  hook 
Spares  the  next  swath  and  all  its  twined  flowers: 


TO  AUTUMN  423 

And  sometimes  like  a  gleaner  thou  dost  keep 
Steady  thy  laden  head  across  a  brook; 
Or  by  a  cider-press,  with  patient  look, 

Thou  watchest  the  last  oozings  hours  by  hours. 

Where  are  the  songs  of  Spring  ?    Ay,  where  are  they  ? 

Think  not  of  them,  thou  hast  thy  music  too, — 
While  barred  clouds  bloom  the  soft-dying  day. 

And  touch  the  stubble-plains  with  rosy  hue; 
Then  in  a  wailful  choir  the  small  gnats  mourn 

Among  the  river  sallows,  borne  aloft 
Or  sinking  as  the  light  wind  lives  or  dies; 
And  full-grown  lambs  loud  bleat  from  hilly  bourn; 

Hedge-crickets  sing;  and  now  with  treble  soft 

The  red-breast  whistles  from  a  garden-croft; 
And  gathering  swallows  twitter  in  the  skies. 

Had  Keats  been  destined  to  know  health  and  peace  of 
mind,  who  can  guess  how  much  more  work  in  this  vein 
and  of  this  quality  the  world  might  have  owed  to  him  ? 


CHAPTER  XIV 

WORK  OF   1818,   1819  CONTINUED:    THE  FRAGMENTS 
AND  EXPERIMENTS 

Snatches  expressive  of  moods — Ode  to  Maia — Hyperion:  its  scheme  and 
scale — Sources:  Homer  and  Hesiod — Pierre  Ronsard — Miltonisms — 
Voices  of  the  Titans — A  match  and  no  match  for  Milton — A  great 
beginning — Question  as  to  sequel — Difficulties  and  a  suggestion — The 
scheme  abandoned — The  Eve  of  St  Mark — Chaucer  and  Morris — 
Judgement  of  Rossetti — Dissent  of  W.  B.  Scott — The  solution — Keats 
as  dramatist — Otho  and  King  Stephen — The  Cap  and  Bells — Why  a 
failure — Flashes  of  Beauty — Recast  of  Hyperion — Its  leading  ideas — 
Their  history  in  Keats's  mind — Preamble:  another  feast  of  fruits — 
The  sanctuary — The  admonition — The  monitress — The  attempt  breaks 
off. 

Much  of  our  clearest  insight  into  Keats's  mind  and 
genius  is  gained  from  the  class  of  his  fragments  which 
do  not  represent  any  definite  poetical  purpose  or  plan, 
and  were  never  meant  to  be  more  than  mere  snatches 
and  momentary  outpourings.  Such,  though  they  only 
express  a  passing  mood,  are  the  lines  in  his  letter  to 
Re5aiolds  of  February  1818,  translating  the  early  song 
of  the  thrush  into  a  warning  not  to  fret  after  knowledge. 
Such  is  the  contrasted  passage  of  shifting,  perplexed 
meditation  on  the  problems  of  life,  and  the  failure  of 
the  imagination  to  solve  them  alone,  in  the  rimed 
epistle  to  the  same  friend  six  weeks  later.  Such, 
very  especially,  is  the  cry  declaring  that  the  true  poet 
is  the  soul  sympathetic  with  every  form  and  mode 
of  life  and  ready  to  merge  its  identity  in  that  of  any 
and  every  sentient  creature:    compare  the  passage  in 

424 


SNATCHES  EXPRESSIVE  OF  MOODS     425 

one  of  his  letters  where  he  tells  how  his  own  can  enter 
into  that  of  a  sparrow  picking  about  the  gravel : — 

WTiere's  the  Poet  ?  show  him !  show  him. 

Muses  nine !  that  I  may  know  him. 

'Tis  the  man  who  with  a  man 

Is  an  equal,  be  he  King, 

Or  poorest  of  the  beggar-clan. 

Or  any  other  wondrous  thing 

A  man  may  be  'twixt  ape  and  Plato; 

'Tis  the  man  who  with  a  bird. 

Wren,  or  Eagle,  finds  his  way  to  » 

All  its  instincts;  he  hath  heard 

The  Lion's  roaring,  and  can  tell 

What  his  horny  throat  expresseth. 

And  to  him  the  Tiger's  yell 

Comes  articulate  and  presseth 

On  his  ear  like  mother-tongue. 

Such  again  are  the  several  passages  in  which  he  expresses 
a  mood  that  frequently  beset  him,  that  of  being  rapt 
in  spirit  too  high  above  earth  to  breathe,  too  far  above 
his  body  not  to  feel  an  awful  intoxication  and  fear  of 
coming  madness : — 

It  is  an  awful  mission, 
A  terrible  division; 
And  leaves  a  gulph  austere 
To  be  fiU'd  with  worldly  fear. 
Aye,  when  the  soul  is  fled 
Too  high  above  our  head. 
Affrighted  do  we  gaze 
After  its  airy  maze. 
As  doth  a  mother  wild, 
"VMien  her  young  infant  child 
Is  in  eagle's  claws — 
And  is  not  this  the  cause 
Of  madness  ? — God  of  Song, 
Thou  bearest  me  along 
Through  sights  I  scarce  can  bear; 
O  let  me,  let  me  share 
With  the  hot  lyre  and  thee, 
The  staid  Philosophy. 
Temper  my  lonely  hours. 
And  let  me  see  thy  bowers 
More  unalarm'd ! 


426  ODE  TO  MAIA 

But  our  main  business  in  this  chapter  must  be  not  with 
illuminating  snatches  such  as  these,  but  with  things 
begun  of  set  purpose  and  not  carried  through. 

When  KeatS;  drawing  near  the  end  of  his  work  on 
Endymion,  was  meditating  what  he  meant  to  be  his 
second  long  and  arduous  poem,  Hyperion,  he  still  thought 
and  spoke  of  it  as  a  'romance.'  But  a  phrase  he  uses 
elsewhere  shows  him  conscious  that  its  style  would  have 
to  be  more  *  naked  and  Grecian'  than  that  of  Endymion. 
Was  he  trying  an  experiment  in  the  naked  and  Grecian 
style  when  on  May  day  1818  he  wrote  at  Teignmouth 
the  beginning  of  an  ode  on  Maia?  He  never  went  on 
with  it,  and  the  fragment  as  it  stands  is  of  fourteen 
lines  only;  but  these  are  in  a  more  truly  Greek  manner 
than  anything  else  he  wrote,  not  even  excepting,  as  I 
have  just  said,  the  Ode  to  Autumn.  The  words  figuring 
what  Greek  poets  were  and  did  for  Greek  communities, 
and  expressing  the  aspiration  to  be  even  as  they,  bear 
the  true,  the  classic,  mint-mark  of  absolute  economy 
and  simplicity  in  absolute  rightness.  Considering  how 
meagre  are  the  hints  antiquity  has  left  us  concerning 
Maia,  the  eldest  of  the  Pleiades  and  mother  of  Hermes, 
and  her  late  identification  with  the  Roman  divinity  to 
whom  sacrifice  was  paid  on  the  first  of  May,  and  hence 
how  little  material  for  development  the  theme  seems 
to  offer, — considering  these  things,  perhaps  it  is  as  well 
that  Keats,  despite  his  promise  to  finish  it  'all  in  good 
time,'  should  have  tantalized  posterity  by  breaking  off 
this  beautiful  thing  where  he  did. 

The  next  fragment  we  come  to  is  colossal, — ^it  is 
Hyperion  itself.  From  the  poem  as  far  as  it  was  written 
no  reader  could  guess  either  that  it  was  taken  up  as  a 
'feverous  reHef  from  tendance  on  his  d3dng  brother, 
or  that  in  continuing  it  later  under  Brown's  roof  he  had 
to  put  force  upon  himself  against  the  intrusion  of  private 
cares  and  affections  upon  his  thoughts,  as  well  as  against 
a  reaction  from  his  own  mode  of  conceiving  and  handling 
the  task  itself.  The  impression  Hyperion  makes  is  one, 
as  Woodhouse  on  first  reading  it  justly  noted,  of  serene 


HYPERION:    ITS  SCHEME  AND  SCALE  427 

mastery  by  the  poet  both  over  himself  and  over  his 
art: — 'It  has  an  air  of  cahn  grandeur  about  it  which 
is  indicative  of  true  power':  and  again, — 'the  above 
lines  give  but  a  faint  idea  of  the  sustained  grandeur  and 
quiet  power  which  characterize  the  poem/  Woodhouse 
goes  on  to  teU  what  he  knew  of  the  scheme  of  the  work 
as  Keats  had  first  conceived  it: — 

The  poem,  if  completed,  would  have  treated  of  the  dethrone- 
ment of  Hyperion,  the  former  God  of  the  Sun,  by  Apollo, — and 
incidentally  of  those  of  Oceanus  by  Neptune,  of  Saturn  by  Jupiter, 
etc.,  and  of  the  war  of  the  giants  for  Saturn's  reestablishment — 
with  other  events,  of  which  we  have  but  very  dark  hints  in  the 
mythological  poets  of  Greece  and  Rome.  In  fact  the  incidents 
would  have  been  pure  creations  of  the  Poet's  brain. 

The  statement  inserted  by  the  publishers  at  the  head  of 
the  volume  in  which  the  poem  appeared  in  1820,  that 
Hyperion  was  intended  to  be  as  long  as  Endymiorij  is 
probably  also  due  to  Woodhouse,  their  right-hand  man 
(Keats,  we  know,  had  nothing  to  do  with  it),  and  may 
represent  what  he  had  gathered  in  conversation  to  have 
been  the  poet's  original  idea.  Mr  de  Selincourt  has 
shown  grounds  for  inferring  that  when  Keats  came  to 
actual  grips  with  the  subject  he  decided  to  treat  it 
much  more  briefly  and  partially.  Clearly  the  essential 
meaning  of  the  story  was  for  him  symbolical;  it  meant 
the  dethronement  of  an  older  and  ruder  worship  by  one 
more  advanced  and  humane,  in  which  ideas  of  ethics 
and  of  arts  held  a  larger  place  beside  ideas  of  nature 
and  her  brute  powers.  Into  this  story  the  poet  plimges, 
not  even  in  the  middle  but  near  the  close.  When  his 
poem  opens,  the  younger  gods,  the  Olympians,  have 
won  their  victory,  and  the  Titans,  all  except  Hjrperion, 
are  already  overthrown.  In  their  debate  whether  to 
fight  again  general  despondency  prevails,  and  only  one 
of  the  fallen,  Enceladus,  strikes  a  note  of  defiance;  so 
that  it  seems  as  if  there  were  nothing  left  to  tell  except 
the  coming  defeat  or  abdication  of  Hyperion  in  favoiu* 
of  Apollo.  Hyperion,  it  is  true,  has  not  yet  spoken 
when  we  are  called  away  from  the  coimcil,  and  Keats 


428        SOURCES:    HOMER  AND  HESIOD 

might  have  made  him  side  with  Enceladus  and  rouse 
his  brethren  to  a  temporary  renewal  of  the  strife.  Or 
leaving  the  Titans  conquered,  he  might,  as  Woodhouse 
suggests,  have  gone  on  to  narrate  the  second  warfare, 
that  waged  against  the  Olympians  not  by  them  but 
later  by  the  Giants  in  revolt.  In  either  case  we  should 
have  seen  the  poet  try  his  hand,  hitherto  untested  in  such 
themes,  on  scenes  of  superhuman  battle  and  violence. 

Woodhouse  is  right  at  any  rate  in  saying  that  the 
hints  for  handling  the  theme  to  be  found  in  the  ancient 
poets  are  few  and  uncertain,  leaving  a  modem  writer 
free  to  invent  most  of  his  incidents  for  himseK.  Beyond 
the  bald  notices  in  his  classical  dictionaries.  Chapman's 
Iliad  would  have  given  Keats  a  picture  of  the  dethroned 
Saturn:  Chapman's  Homer's  hymn  to  Apollo  might 
have  filled  his  imagination,  even  to  overflowing,  with 
visions  of  the  youth  of  that  god  in  Delos, — ^  Chief  isle 
of  the  embowered  Cyclades':  Hesiod's  Theogony  (which 
he  had  doubtless  read  in  the  translation  of  Pope's  butt 
and  enemy,  Thomas  Cooke)  would  have  taught  him 
more,  but  very  confusedly,  about  the  warfare  of  Gods, 
Titans,  and  Giants  in  general,  besides  inspiring  his 
vision  of  the  den  where  the  Titans  lie  vanquished; 
while  he  would  have  gleaned  other  stray  matters  from 
Sandys's  notes  on  certain  passages  of  Ovid.  As  far  as 
his  beloved  English  poets  are  concerned,  brief  allusions 
occur  in  the  Faerie  Queene  and  in  Paradise  Lost,  where 
Milton  includes  the  fallen  Titans  among  the  rebel  hosts 
that  flock  to  the  standard  of  Satan  in  hell.  But  I 
think  the  source  freshest  in  his  mind  at  the  moment 
when  he  began  to  write  is  one  which  has  not  hitherto 
been  suggested,  the  ode  of  the  famous  French  Renais- 
sance poet  Ronsard  to  his  friend  Michel  de  FHdpital. 
We  know  by  his  translation  of  the  sonnet  Nature  ornant 
Cassandre  that  Keats  had  the  works  of  Ronsard  in  his 
hands — ^lent,  it  would  seem,  by  Mr  Taylor — exactly 
about  this  time.  The  ode  in  question,  partly  founded 
on  Hesiod,  partly  on  Horace,  ^  but  largely  on  Ronsard's 

1  Carm.  iii.  4,  which  probably  Keats  knew  also  at  first  hand. 


PIERRE  RONSARD  429 

own  invention,  relates  the  birth  of  the  Muses,  their 
training  by  their  mother  M^moire  (  =  Mnemosyne),  their 
desire  as  young  girls  to  visit  their  father  Jupiter,  their 
mother's  consent,  their  undersea  journey  to  the  palace 
of  Oceanus  where  Jupiter  is  present  at  a  high  festival, 
their  choral  singing  before  him,  first  of  the  strife  of 
Neptune  and  Pallas  for  the  soil  of  Attica,  and  then  of 
the  battle  of  the  gods  and  giants: — 

Apres  sur  la  plus  grosse  corde 
D'un  bruit  qui  tonnait  jusqu'aux  cieux, 
Le  pouce  des  Muses  accorde 
L'assaut  des  Geants  et  des  Dieux. 

Keats,  although  he  wi-ites  of  the  battle  of  the  Gods  not 
against  the  Giants  but  against  the  earlier  Titans,  yet 
when  he  rolls  out  rebel  names  like  this, — 

Cceus,  and  Gyges,  and  Briareus; 
Typhon  and  Doloi,  and  Porphyrion 
Were  pent  in  regions  of  laborious  breath 
Dungeon'd  in  opaque  elements, — 

Keats,  when  he  rolls  out  these  rebel  names,  has  surely 
been  haunted  by  the  strophes  of  Ronsard: — 

Styx  d'un  noir  halecret  rempare 
Ses  bras,  ses  jambes,  et  son  sein, 
Sa  fille  amenant  par  la  main 
Contre  Cotte,  Gyge,  et  Briare.^ 


Neptune  a  la  fourche  estofee 
De  trois  crampons  vint  se  mesler 
Par  la  troupe  contre  Typhee 
Qui  rouoit  une  fonde  en  Tair: 
Ici  Phoebus  d'un  trait  qu'il  jette 
Fit  Encelade  trebucher, 
La  Porphyre  lui  fit  broncher 
Hors  des  poings  Tare  et  la  sagette. 

For  such  an  epic  theme  Keats  felt  instinctively,  when 
he  set  to  work,  that  an  epic  and  not  a  romance  treat- 
ment was  necessary ;  and  for  that  English  poet  the  obvious 
epic  model  is  Milton.  Ever  since  his  visit  to  Bailey  at 
Oxford,  and  especially  during  his  stay  at  Teignmouth 

^  The  daughter  of  Styx  is  Victory,  and  'halecret'  is  a  corslet. 


430  MILTONISMS 

the  next  year,  Keats  had  been  absorbing  Milton  and 
taking  him  into  his  being,  as  formerly  he  had  taken 
Shakespeare  and  the  Elizabethans,  and  now  he  can 
utter  his  own  thoughts  and  imaginations  almost  with 
Milton's  voice.  Speaking  generally  of  the  blank  verse 
of  Hyperion,  its  rhythms  are  almost  as  full  and  sonorous 
as  Milton's  own,  but  simpler;  its  march  more  straight- 
forward, with  less  of  what  De  Quincey  calls  'solemn 
planetary  wheelings';  its  periods  do  not  sweep  through 
such  complex  evolutions  to  so  stately  and  far  foreseen 
a  close.  TheMiltonisms  in  Hyperion  are  rather  matters 
of  diction  and  construction — construction  almost  always 
derived  from  the  Latin — ^than  of  rhythm:  sometimes 
also  they  are  matters  of  direct  verbal  echo  and  reminis- 
cence.   To  take  a  single  instance  out  of  many: — 

For  as  among  us  mortals  omens  drear 
Fright  and  perplex,  so  also  shuddered  he. 

It  is  only  in  Hyperion  that  Keats  habitually  thus  puts 
the  noun  Latin-wise  before  the  adjective:  and  the  omens 
that  'perplex'  are  derived  from  the  eclipse  which  in 
Paradise  Lost  'with  fear  of  change  Perplexes  monarchs.' 
Throughout  the  fragment  Keats  uses  frequently  and 
with  fine  effect  the  Miltonic  figure  of  the  'turn'  or 
rhetorical  iteration  of  identical  words  to  a  fresh  purport, 
as  in  that  noble  phrase  which  seems  to  have  inspired 
one  of  the  finest  passages  in  Shelley's  Defence  of  Poesy  ^: 

How  beautiful,  if  Sorrow  had  not  made 
Sorrow  more  beautiful  than  Beauty's  self. 

It  has  been  said,  and  justly,  that  Keats  has  done 
nothing  greater  than  the  debate  of  the  fallen  Titans  in 
their  cave  of  exile,  modelled  frankly  in  its  main  outlines 
on  that  of  the  rebel  angels  in  Paradise  Lost,  but  with 
the  personages  and  utterances  nevertheless  entirely 
his  own.  In  creating  and  animating  these  colossal 
figures  between  the  elemental  and  the  human,  what 
masterly  imaginative  instinct  does  he  show — to  take 

1  The  passage  ending,  '  the  pleasure  that  is  in  sorrow  is  sweeter  than  the 
pleasure  of  pleasure  itself.' 


VOICES  OF  THE  TITANS  431 

one  point  only — in  the  choice  of  similitudes,  drawn  from 
the  vast  inarticulate  sounds  of  nature,  by  which  he 
seeks  to  make  us  realise  their  voices.  Thus  of  the  mur- 
muring of  the  assembled  gods  when  Saturn  is  about  to 
speak: — 

There  is  a  roaring  in  the  bleak-grown  pines 

When  Winter  lifts  his  voice;  there  is  a  noise 

Among  immortals  when  a  God  gives  sign, 

With  hushing  finger,  how  he  means  to  load 

His  tongue  with  the  full  weight  of  utterless  thought, 

With  thunder,  and  with  music,  and  with  pomp: 

Such  noise  is  like  the  roar  of  bleak-grown  pines. 

This  is  not  a  whit  the  less  Keats  for  his  use  of  the  Mil- 
tonic  Hum'  in  rounding  the  period  by  a  repetition  in 
the  last  line  of  the  ^bleak-grown  pines'  from  the  first. 
Again,  of  Oceanus  answering  his  fallen  chief: — 

So  ended  Saturn;  and  the  God  of  the  Sea, 

Sophist  and  sage,  from  no  Athenian  grove. 

But  cogitation  in  his  watery  shades. 

Arose,  with  locks  not  oozy,  and  began, 

In  murmurs,  which  his  first-endeavouring  tongue 

Caught  infant-like  from  the  far-foamed  sands. 

Here  the  affirmation  by  negation  in  the  second  and 
fourth  lines  is  a  Latin  usage  already  employed  by  Keats 
in  the  Pot  of  Basil  ^:  the  ^ locks  not  oozy'  are  a  reminis- 
cence from  Lycidas  and  the  *  first-endeavouring  tongue' 
from  The  Vacation  Exercise.  But  into  what  a  vitally 
apt  and  beautiful  new  music  of  his  own  has  Keats 
moulded  and  converted  all  such  echoes.  Once  more, 
of  Clymene  following  Enceladus  in  debate: — 

So  far  her  voice  flow*d  on,  like  timorous  brook 
That,  lingering  along  a  pebbled  coast. 
Doth  fear  to  meet  the  sea:  but  sea  it  met. 
And  shuddered;  for  the  overwhelming  voice 
Of  huge  Enceladus  swallowed  it  in  wrath: 
The  ponderous  syllables,  like  sullen  waves 
In  the  half -glutted  hollows  of  reef-rocks. 
Came  booming  thus. 

'  With  duller  steel  than  the  Persian  sword 
They  cut  away  no  formless  monster's  head. 


432    A  MATCH  AND  NO  MATCH  FOR  MILTON 

In  this  last  example  the  sublimity  owes  nothing  to  Milton 
except  in  the  single  case  of  the  repetition  in  the  third 
line.  Even  the  scoffing  Byron  recognized  after  Keats^s 
death  the  authentic  4arge  utterance  of  the  early  gods' 
in  passages  like  these,  though  Keats  in  his  modesty  had 
himself  refused  to  recognize  it. 

Further  to  compare  Keats  with  Milton, — ^the  poet  of 
Hyperion  is  naturally  no  match  for  Milton  in  passages 
where  the  elder  master  has  been  inspired  by  life-long 
impassioned  meditation  on  his  readings  of  history  and 
romance,  like  that  famous  one  ending  with 

What  resounds 
In  fable  or  romance  of  Uther^s  son 
Begirt  with  British  and  Armoric  knights 
Or  all  who  since,  baptized  or  infidel 
Jousted  in  Aspramont  or  Montalban, 
Damasco,  or  Marocco,  or  Trebizond, 
Or  whom  Biserta  sent  from  Afric  shore 
When  Charlemain  with  all  his  peerage  fell 
By  Fontarrabia — . 

On  the  other  hand  Milton,  even  in  the  sweetness  and 
the  nearness  to  nature  of  Comus  and  his  other  early 
work,  is  scarce  a  match  for  Keats  when  it  comes  to  the 
evocation,  even  in  a  mode  relatively  simple,  of  nature's 
secret  sources  of  delight, — as  thus: 

throughout  all  the  isle 
There  was  no  covert,  no  retired  cave 
Unhaunted  by  the  murmurous  noise  of  waves 
Though  scarcely  heard  in  many  a  green  recess: 

while  comparison  is  scarcely  possible  in  the  case  of  the 
nature  images  most  characteristically  Keats's  own,  for 
instance: — 

As  when,  upon  a  tranced  summer  night. 
Those  green-robed  senators  of  mighty  woods. 
Tall  oaks,  branch-charmed  by  the  earnest  gtars. 
Dream,  and  so  dream  all  night  without  a  stir — . 

Neither  to  the  Greek  nor  the  Miltonic,  but  essentially 
to  the  modern,  the  romantic,  sentiment  of  nature  does 
it  belong  to  try  and  express,  by  such  a  concourse  of 


A  GREAT  BEGINNING  433 

metaphors  and  epithets,  every  effect  at  once,  to  the 
most  fugitive,  which  a  forest  scene  by  starHght  can 
have  upon  the  mind:  the  preeminence  of  the  oaks 
among  the  other  trees — ^their  quasi-hiunan  venerable- 
ness — their  verdure,  unseen  in  the  darkness — ^the  sense 
of  their  preternatural  stillness  and  suspended  life  in  an 
atmosphere  that  seems  to  vibrate  with  mysterious 
influences  communicated  between  earth  and  sky. 

All  good  poems,  it  has  been  said,  begin  well.  None 
begins  better  than  Hyperion,  with  its  ^  Deep  in  the  shady 
sadness  of  a  vale,'  and  its  grand  mournful  dialogue 
between  the  discrowned  Saturn  and  the  Titaness  Thea, 
his  would-be  comforter.  Then,  with  a  rich  contrast 
from  this  scene  of  despondency,  comes  the  scene,  dazz- 
ling and  resplendent  for  all  its  ominousness,  of  the 
mingled  wrath  and  terror  of  the  threatened  sun-god  in 
his  flaming  palace.  The  second  book,  relating  the 
council  of  the  dethroned  Titans,  has  neither  the  con- 
trasted sublimities  of  the  first  nor  the  intensity,  rising 
almost  to  fever-point,  of  the  unfinished  third,  where 
we  leave  Apollo  undergoing  a  convulsive  change  under 
the  afflatus  of  Mnemosyne,  and  about  to  put  on  the 
fuU  powers  of  his  godhead.  But  it  has  a  rightness  and 
controlled  power  of  its  own  which  place  it,  to  my  mind, 
fuUy  on  a  level  with  the  other  two.  And  it  is  in  this 
book,  in  the  speech  of  Oceanus,  that  Keats  sets  forth 
the  whole  symbolical  purport  and  meaning  of  the  myth 
as  he  had  conceived  it: —  ^.^o 

Now  comes  the  pain  of  truth,  to  whom  'tis  pain;  -"^      ^ 

O  folly !  for  to  bear  all  naked  truths, 

And  to  envisage  circumstance,  all  calm. 

That  is  the  top  of  sovereignty.     Mark  well ! 

As  Heaven  and  Earth  are  fairer,  fairer  far 

Than  Chaos  and  blank  Darkness,  though  once  chiefs; 

And  as  we  show  beyond  that  Heaven  and  Earth 

In  form  and  shape  compact  and  beautiful. 

In  will,  in  action  free,  companionship. 

And  thousand  other  signs  of  purer  life; 

So  on  our  heels  a  fresh  perfection  treads, 

A  power  more  strong  in  beauty,  born  of  us 


>--\ 


) 


434  QUESTION  AS  TO  SEQUEL 

And  fated  to  excel  us,  as  we  pass 
In  glory  that  old  Darkness:  nor  are  we 
Thereby  more  conquer'd,  than  by  us  the  rule 
Of  shapeless  Chaos.     Say,  doth  the  dull  soil 
Quarrel  with  the  proud  forests  it  hath  fed. 
And  feedeth  still,  more  comely  than  itself  ? 
Can  it  deny  the  chief dom  of  green  groves  ? 
Or  shall  the  tree  be  envious  of  the  dove 
Because  it  cooeth,  and  hath  snowy  wings 
To  wander  wherewithal  and  find  its  joys  ? 
We  are  such  forest-trees,  and  our  fair  boughs 
Have  bred  forth,  not  pale  solitary  doves. 
But  eagles  golden-feather'd,  who  do  tower 
Above  us  in  their  beauty,  and  must  reign 
In  right  thereof;  for  'tis  the  eternal  law 
That  first  in  beauty  should  be  first  in  might: 

That  difficulty,  to  which  we  have  referred,  of  sur- 
mising how  there  could  have  remained  material  to  fill 
out  a  poem  on  the  Titanomachia  which  had  begun  with 
the  Titans,  all  but  one,  dethroned  already,  seems  to 
increase  when  we  consider  the  above  speech  of  Oceanus, 
setting  forth  with  resigned  prophetic  wisdom  the  fated 
necessity  of  their  fall.  It  increases  still  further  when 
Clymene,  following  on  the  same  side  as  Oceanus,  tells 
how  she  has  heard  the  strains  of  a  new  and  ravishing 
music  from  the  lyre  of  Apollo  which  have  made  her 
cast  away  in  despair  the  instrument  of  her  own  formless 
music,  the  sea-shell;  and  still  further  again  when  in 
the  next  book  we  witness  the  meeting  of  Apollo  with 
the  Titaness  Mnemosyne,  mother  of  the  Muses,  who 
for  his  sake  has  'forsaken  old  and  sacred  thrones,'  and 
when  we  hear  him  proclaim  how  in  the  inspiration  of 
her  presence. 

Knowledge  enormous  makes  a  God  of  me. 
Names,  deeds,  grey  legends,  dire  events,  rebellions. 
Majesties,  sovran  voices,  agonies. 
Creations  and  destroyings,  all  at  once 
Pour  into  the  wide  hollows  of  my  brain. 
And  deify  me,  as  if  some  blithe  wine 
Or  bright  elixir  peerless  I  had  drunk, 
And  so  become  immortal. 


DIFFICULTIES  AND  A  SUGGESTION     435 

Before  the  glory  of  this  new-deified  Apollo,  what 
could  long  have  delayed  the  defeat  or  abdication  of  the 
elder  sun-god  Hyperion? — what  could  have  remained 
for  Keats  to  invent  that  should  have  much  enriched 
or  lengthened  out  his  poem  ?  The  sense  of  the  difficulty 
of  sustaining  the  battle  of  the  primeval  powers  against 
these  new  and  nobler  successors  may  well  have  been  one 
of  the  things  (even  had  he  not  had  Milton's  comparative 
failure  with  the  warfare  in  heaven  to  warn  him)  that 
hindered  his  going  on  with  his  poem.  To  the  reader 
there  occurs  another  and  even  greater  difficulty:  and 
that  is  that  Keats  had  already  given  to  his  fallen  elder 
gods  or  Titans  so  much  not  only  of  majesty  but  of 
nobleness  and  goodness  that  it  is  hard  to  see  wherein 
he  could  have  shown  their  successors  excelling  them. 
He  had  represented  Saturn  as  wroth,  indeed,  at  his 
downfall,  but  chiefly  because  it  leaves  him 

— smothered  up. 
And  buried  from  all  godlike  exercise 
Of  influence  benign  on  planets  pale, 
Of  admonition  to  the  winds  and  seas. 
Of  peaceful  sway  above  man's  harvesting. 
And  all  those  acts  which  Deity  supreme 
Doth  ease  its  heart  of  love  in. 

Increase  of  knowledge,  of  skill  in  the  arts  of  life  and 
of  beauty,  the  gods  of  the  new  dynasty  might  indeed 
extend  to  mankind,  but  what  increase  of  love  and 
beneficence?  Even  the  relations  of  Saturn  to  his 
father  Coelus  (the  Greek  Uranus),  which  in  the  ancient 
cosmogony  are  of  the  crudest  barbarity,  Keats  in 
Hyperion  makes  benignant  and  sympathetic. 

Such  inherent  difficulties  as  these  might  weU  have 
made  Keats  diffident  of  his  power  to  complete  his  poem 
as  a  rounded  or  satisfying  whole  had  its  intended  scope 
been  what  we  are  told.  But  I  am  sometimes  tempted 
to  conjecture  that  his  root  idea  had  been  other  than 
what  lus  friends  attributed  to  him, — that  battle,  and  the 
victory  of  the  Olympians  over  the  Titans  or  Giants  or 
both,  would  not  in  fact  have  been  his  main  theme,  but 


436  THE  SCHEME  ABANDONED 

that  he  intended  to  present  to  us  Apollo,  enthroned 
after  the  abdication  of  Hyperion,  in  the  character  of  a 
prophet  and  to  have  put  into  his  mouth  revelations  of 
things  to  come,  a  great  monitory  vision  of  the  world's 
future.  To  such  a  supposition  some  colour  is  surely 
lent  by  the  speech  of  Apollo  above  quoted  on  the 
'knowledge  enormous'  just  poured  into  his  brain  by 
Mnemosyne.  On  the  other  hand  it  has  to  be  remem- 
bered that  Keats  himself,  in  a  forecast  of  his  work 
made  ten  months  before  it  was  written,  shows  clearly 
that  he  then  meant  his  Apollo  to  be  above  all  things  a 
god  of  action. 

Keats  himself,  writing  some  eight  months  later,  when 
he  had  finally  decided  to  give  up  his  epic  attempt, 
cites  as  his  chief  reason  a  re-action  of  his  critical  judg- 
ment against  the  Miltonic  style,  at  least  as  a  style  suitable 
for  him,  Keats,  to  work  in: — 

I  have  given  up  Hyperion — there  were  too  many  Miltonic 
inversions  in  it — Miltonic  verse  cannot  be  written  but  in  an 
artful,  or  rather,  artist's  humour.  I  wish  to  give  myself  up  to 
other  sensations.  English  ought  to  be  kept  up.  It  may  be 
interesting  to  you  to  pick  out  some  lines  from  Hyperion,  and  put 
a  mark  *  to  the  false  beauty  proceeding  from  art,  and  one  to  the 
true  voice  of  feeling.  Upon  my  soul  'twas  imagination — I  cannot 
make  the  distinction — Every  now  and  then  there  is  a  Miltonic 
intonation — But  I  cannot  make  the  division  properly. 

And  again:  'I  have  but  lately  stood  on  my  guard 
against  Milton.  Life  to  him  would  be  death  to  me. 
Miltonic  verse  cannot  be  written,  but  is  the  verse  of  art. 
I  wish  to  devote  myseK  to  another  verse  alone.'  This 
re-action  was  certainly  not  fully  conscious  or  formulated 
in  Keats's  mind  by  the  previous  winter.  But  it  would 
seem  none  the  less  to  have  been  working  in  him  in- 
stinctively: for  the  moment  he  had  turned,  in  The  Eve 
of  St  Agnes,  to  a  romance  in  the  flowing,  straightforward, 
Spenserian-Chattertonian  manner  of  narration,  he  had 
been  able  to  carry  his  task  through  with  felicity  and  ease. 
This  was  on  his  excursion  to  Hampshire  in  the  latter 
half  of  January.    Within  three  weeks  of  his  return  he 


THE  EVE  OF  ST  MARK  437 

was  at  work  again  on  a  kindred  theme  of  popular  and 
traditional  belief.  The  Eve  of  St  Mark.  The  belief  was 
that  a  person  standing  in  the  church  porch  of  any  town 
or  village  on  the  evening  before  St  Mark^s  day  (April 
24th)  might  thereby  gain  a  vision  of  all  the  inhabitants 
fated  to  die  or  fall  grievously  sick  within  the  year. 
Those  destined  to  die  would  be  seen  passing  in  but  not 
returning,  those  who  were  to  be  in  peril  and  recover 
would  go  in  and  after  a  while  come  out.  The  heroine 
of  the  poem,  to  whom  this  vision  would  appear,  was  to 
be  a  maiden  of  Canterbury  named  Bertha,  no  doubt 
after  the  first  Christian  queen  of  Kent,  the  Frankish 
wife  of  Ethelbert;  the  scene,  Canterbury  itself,  memories 
of  the  poet's  stay  there  in  1817  mingling  apparently 
with  impressions  of  his  recent  visit  to  Chichester.  Keats 
never  got  on  with  this  poem  after  his  first  three  or  four 
days'  work  (February  14th-17th,  1819),  and  it  remains 
a  mere  fragment,  tantalizing  and  singular,  of  a  hundred 
and  twenty  lines'  length.  Why?  Perhaps  merely 
because  it  was  begun  ahnost  at  the  very  hour  when  he 
became  the  accepted  lover  of  Fanny  Brawne.  We  have 
seen  how  various  causes,  but  chiefly  the  obsession  of 
that  passion,  paralysed  his  power  of  work  for  the  next 
two  months,  and  what  were  the  thoughts  and  tasks 
that  held  him  fully  occupied  afterwards.  It  has  been 
suggested  by  the  late  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti  that  Keats 
meant  to  give  the  story  a  turn  applicable  to  himself  and 
his  mistress,  and  that  the  present  fragment  would  have 
served  as  the  opening  of  a  poem  which  afterwards,  in 
sickness,  he  mentioned  to  her  as  being  in  his  mind: — 
'I  would  show  some  one  in  love,  as  I  am,  with  a  person 
living  in  such  Liberty  as  you  do.'  I  can  find  no  sure 
evidence,  internal  or  external,  either  to  refute  the 
suggestion  or  confirm  it. 

The  fragment  of  The  Eve  of  St  Mark  is  Keats's  only 
attempt  at  narrative  writing  in  the  eight-syllabled  four- 
stress  couplet.  Its  pace  and  movement  are  nearer  to 
Chaucer  in  The  Romaunt  of  the  Rose  or  The  House  of 
Fame  than  to  Coleridge  or  Scott  or  any  other  model  of 


438  CHAUCER  AND  MORRIS 

Keats's  own  time.  That  he  was  writing  with  Chaucer 
in  his  mind  is  proved  by  some  Hnes  in  which  he  tries 
in  Rowley  fashion  to  reproduce  Chaucer's  actual  style 
and  vocabulary,  thus: — 

Gif  ye  wol  stonden  hardie  wight — 
Amiddes  of  the  blacke  night — 
Righte  in  the  churche  porch,  pardie 
Ye  wol  behold  a  companie 
Approchen  thee  full  dolourouse 
For  sooth  to  sain  from  everich  house 
Be  it  in  city  or  village 
Wol  come  the  Phantom  and  image 
Of  ilka  gent  and  ilka  carle 
Who  colde  Deathe  hath  in  parle 
And  wol  some  day  that  very  year 
Touchen  with  foule  venime  spear 
And  sadly  do  them  all  to  die — 
Hem  all  shalt  thou  see  verilie — 
And  everichon  shall  by  thee  pass 
All  who  must  die  that  year,  Alas. 

These  lines  give  us  a  sure  key  to  the  main  motive  of 
the  story  which  was  to  follow.  With  some  others  in 
the  same  style,  they  are  quoted  by  the  poet  as  com- 
posing a  gloss  written  in  minute  script  on  the  margin 
of  a  wonderful  illuminated  book  over  which  the  damsel 
is  found  poring  and  which  is  to  have  some  mysterious 
influence  on  her  destiny.  More  noticeable  and  interesting 
than  their  somewhat  random  Rowleyism  is  the  way  in 
which  some  of  the  descriptive  lines  in  the  body  of  the  poem 
anticipate  the  very  cadences  of  Chaucer's  great  latter- 
day  disciple,  William  Morris.  The  first  eight  or  ten 
lines  of  the  following  might  have  come  straight  from 
The  Man  horn  to  he  King  or  The  Land  East  of  the  Sun, 
and  provide,  as  it  were,  in  the  history  of  our  poetry  a 
direct  stepping-stone  between  Chaucer  and  Morris: — 

The  city  streets  were  clean  and  fair 
From  wholesome  drench  of  April  rains; 
And,  on  the  western  window  panes, 
The  chilly  sunset  faintly  told 
Of  unmatur'd  green  vallies  cold. 


JUDGMENT  OF  ROSSETTI  439 

Of  the  green  thorny  bloomless  hedge. 
Of  rivers  new  with  spring-tide  sedge. 
Of  primroses  by  shelter' d  rills. 
And  daisies  on  the  aguish  hills. 
Twice  holy  was  the  Sabbath-bell: 
The  silent  streets  were  crowded  well 
With  staid  and  pious  companies. 
Warm  from  their  fire-side  orat'ries; 
And  moving,  with  demurest  air. 
To  even-song,  and  vesper  prayer. 
Each  arched  porch,  and  entry  low, 
Was  fiird  with  patient  folk  and  slow. 
With  whispers  hush,  and  shuffling  feet. 
While  play'd  the  organ  loud  and  sweet. 

The  relation  of  this  fragment  to  the  Pre-Raphaelites 
of  the  mid  nineteenth  centuiy  and  their  work  is  altogether 
ciirious  and  interesting.  It  was  natural  that  it  should 
appeal  to  them  by  the  pure  and  living  freshness  of 
English  nature-description  with  which  it  opens,  by  the 
perfectly  imagined  scene  of  hushed  movement  in  the 
twilight  streets  that  follows,  perhaps  most  of  all  by 
the  insistent  delight  in  vivid  colour,  and  in  minuteness 
of  animated  and  suggestive  detail,  which  marks  the 
final  indoor  scene  of  the  maiden  Bertha  over  her  book  by 
firelight.  But  what  is  strange  is  that  Rossetti  should 
not  only  have  coupled  the  fragment  with  La  Belle  Dame 
sans  Merd  as  'the  chastest  and  choicest  example  of 
Keats's  maturing  manner,'  an  opinion  which  may  well 
pass,  but  that  he  should  have  claimed  it  as  showing 
'astonishingly  real  mediaevalism  for  one  not  bred  an 
artist,'  and  even  as  the  finest  picture  of  the  Middle  Age 
period  ever  done.  The  truth  is  that  the  description  of 
the  Sabbath  streets  and  the  maiden's  chamber  are  not 
mediaeval  at  all  and  probably  not  intended  to  be,  while 
the  one  thing  so  intended,  the  illuminated  manuscript 
from  which  she  reads,  is  a  quite  impossible  invention 
jumbling  fantastically  together  things  that  never  could 
have  figured  in  the  same  manuscript,  things  from  the 
Golden  Legend,  from  the  book  of  Exodus,  the  book  of 
Revelation,   with   others  from  no  possible  manuscript 


440  DISSENT  OF  W.  B.  SCOTT 

source  at  all.  Keats  evidently  took  some  interest  in 
mediaeval  illuminations,  for  in  speculating  on  the  old 
skulls  of  supposed  monks  at  Beauly  Abbey  he  had 
apostrophized  one  of  them, —  . 

Poor  Skull,  thy  fingers  set  ablaze 
With  silver  saint  in  golden  rays. 
The  holy  Missal:  thou  didst  craze 

Mid  bead  and  spangle. 
While  others  pass'd  their  idle  days 

In  coil  and  wrangle. 

But  he  can  have  seen  few  and  made  no  study  of  them, 
and  his  imagmed  mystically  illuminated  book  in  The 
Eve  of  St  Mark  is  invented  with  no  such  fine  instinctive 
tact  or  likelihood  as  his  imagined  Grecian  urn  of  the  ode. 
An  elder  member  of  the  Rossetti  circle,  that  shrewd 
and  caustic,  very  originally  minded  if  only  half  accom- 
plished Scottish  poet  and  painter,  William  Bell  Scott, 
was  much  exercised  over  his  friend's  misconception  in 
this  matter.  I  will  give  his  comment,  certainly  in  some 
points  just,  as  written  to  me  in  1885.  ^On  reading 
the  fragment  it  seems  to  me  impossible  to  resist  the 
conclusion  that  the  scene  represented  is  of  the  present 
day.  The  dull  and  quiet  Simday  evening  represented 
is  of  our  time  in  any  cathedral  town  in  England,  not 
the  Sunday  evening  of  old  when  morning  Mass  was  the 
religious  observance,  and  the  evening  was  spent  in  long- 
bow and  popinjay  games  and  practice.  The  weary  girl 
sits  at  a  coal  fire  with  a  screen  behind  her,  a  Japanese 
screen  apparently,'  [Japanese  or  old  English  lacquer 
imitating  Oriental  the  screen  certainly  is].  'Every 
item  of  the  description  is  modem.  But  alas!  what 
shall  we  say  to  the  ancient  illimiinated  MS.  she  has  in 
hand,  with  the  pictures  of  early  martyrs  dying  by  fire, 
the  Inquisition  pimishment  of  heretics,  and  the  writing 
annotated,  the  notes  referred  to  modern  printers'  signs? 
As  he  describes  a  mediaeval  MS.  book  so  badly,  it  may 
be  said  he  intended  the  scene  of  the  poem  to  be  mediaeval, 
but  did  the  description  also  so  badly.  But  no,  the 
description  of  the  dreariness  of  Sunday  evening,  utterly 


THE  SOLUTION  441 

silent  but  for  the  passing  of  the  people  going  to  evening 
sermon;  is  admirable.'  By  ^ badly'  my  old  friend  meant 
inexactly.  But  Keats  never  was  nor  tried  to  be  exact 
in  his  antiquarianism.  If  we  take  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes 
as  intended  to  be  a  faithful  picture  from  the  Middle  Ages, 
it  simply  goes  to  pieces  in  the  line — 

And  the  long  carpets  rose  along  the  gusty  floor. 

Probably  neither  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes  nor  St  Mark^s  Eve 
was  dated  with  any  definiteness  in  the  poet's  mind 
at  all.  A  reference  he  makes  to  the  last-named  piece 
in  a  letter  from  Winchester  the  following  autumn  lends 
no  definite  support  either  to  the  modern  or  the  mediaeval 
interpretation: — 'Some  time  since  I  began  a  poem 
called  The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  quite  in  the  spirit  of  town 
quietude.  I  think  it  will  give  you  the  sensation  of 
walking  about  an  old  country  town  on  a  coolish  evening.' 
The  impression  of  mediaevahsm  which  the  two  poems 
convey  is  not  by  any  evidence  of  antiquarian  knowledge 
or  accuracy  but  by  the  intense  spirit  of  romance  that 
is  in  them, — ^by  that  impassioned  delight  in  vivid  colour 
and  beautiful,  imaginative  detail  which  we  have  noted. 
After  his  four  days'  start  on  this  poem  in  February 
came  the  speU  of  two  months'  idleness  which  towards 
its  close  yielded  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci  and  came 
to  an  end  with  the  Ode  to  Psyche^  followed  in  the  course 
of  May  by  the  four  other  odes.  The  choral  Song  of 
the  Four  Fairies,  for  some  inchoate  opera,  sent  by 
Keats  to  his  brother  together  with  La  Belle  Dame,  is 
not  worth  pausing  upon,  and  we  may  pass  to  Keats's 
main  work  of  the  ensuing  July  and  August,  Otho  the 
Great.  This  is  no  fragment,  having  been  duly  finished 
to  the  last  scene  of  the  last  act;  but  it  is  very  much 
of  an  experiment.  The  question  whether  Keats,  had 
he  lived,  might  have  become  a  great  dramatic  poet 
and  creator  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  possible.  His 
intense  and  growing  interest  in  humankind,  together 
with  his  recorded  and  avowed  liability  to  receive  ('like 
putty,'  as  modern  criticism  has  conjectured  of  Shake- 


442  KEATS  AS  DRAMATIST 

speare)  the  impression  of  any  character  he  might  come 
in  contact  with,  has  led  many  students  to  beheve  that 
he  had  in  him  the  stuff  of  a  great  creative  playwright. 
Otho  the  Great  does  nothing  to  solve  the  question.  The 
plot  and  construction,  as  we  have  said,  were  entirely 
Brown's,  building  with  quite  arbitrary  freedom  on  certain 
bald  historical  facts  of  the  rebelHon  raised  against  Otho, 
in  the  course  of  his  Hungarian  wars,  by  his  son  Ludolf 
and  the  Red  Duke  Conrad  of  Lorraine,  whom  the 
emperor  subsequently  forgave.  Creation  demands  fore- 
knowledge, premeditation  on  the  characters  you  desire 
to  create  and  the  situations  in  which  they  are  to  be 
placed,  and  Keats,  Brown  tells  us,  only  foreknew  what 
was  coming  in  any  scene  after  they  had  sat  down  at 
the  table  to  work  on  it.  His  business  was  to  supply 
the  words,  and  what  the  result  shows  is  only  the 
surprising  facility  with  which  he  could  by  this  time  im- 
provise poetry  to  order.  The  speeches  in  Otho  are  much 
more  than  passably  poetical,  they  are  often  quite 
brilliant  and  touched  with  Keats's  imique  genius  for 
felicity  in  lines  and  phrases.  But  they  affect  us  as  put 
into  the  mouths  of  puppet  speakers,  not  as  coming  out 
of  the  hearts  and  passions  of  men  and  women. 

In  rhythm  they  are  vital  and  varied  enough,  in 
style  extremely  high-pitched,  and  they  resemble  much 
Elizabethan  work  of  the  second  order  in  smothering 
action  and  passion  under  a  redundance  and  feverish 
excess  of  poetry.  There  is  violence  amounting  to 
hysteria  alike  in  the  villainy  of  Conrad  and  of  his  sister 
Auranthe,  the  remorse  of  Albert,  and  the  mixture  of 
filial  devotion  and  lover's  blindness  in  Ludolf,  with  his 
vengeful  frenzy  when  he  finds  how  he  has  been  gulled. 
Keats,  it  is  recorded,  had  in  his  eye  the  special  gift  of 
Edmund  Kean  for  enacting  frantic  extremes  and  long- 
drawn  agonies  of  passion;  and  it  is  possible  that  as 
played  by  him  the  last  act,  of  which  Keats  took  the 
conduct  as  well  as  the  writing  into  his  own  hands, 
might  have  proved  effective  on  the  stage.  It  shows 
the  maddened  Conrad  bent  on  executing  vengeance  on 


OTHO  AND  KING  STEPHEN  443 

the  traitress  Auranthe,  and  insanely  stabbing  empty 
air  while  he  imagines  he  is  stabbing  his  victim,  mitil 
curtains  drawn  aside  disclose  an  inner  apartment  where 
she  has  at  the  very  moment  fallen  self-slain.  But  it  is 
doubtful  whether  any  acting  could  carry  off  a  plot  so 
ultra-romantically  extravagant  and  in  places  so  obscure, 
or  characters  so  incommensurably  more  eloquent  than 
they  are  alive.  Nor  do  lovers  of  Keats  commonly 
care  to  read  the  play  twice,  for  all  its  bursts  and  corusca- 
tions of  fine  poetry,  feeling  that  these  do  not  spring 
from  the  poet's  own  inner  seK  and  imagination,  but  are 
rather  as  fireworks  fitted  by  a  man  of  genius  on  to  a 
frame  which  another  man,  barely  of  talent,  has  put 
together. 

The  case  is  different  when  we  come  to  King  Stephen, 
the  brief  dramatic  fragment  on  which  Keats  wrought 
alone  after  Otho  the  Great  was  finished.  This  teaches 
us  one  thing  at  any  rate  about  Keats,  that  he  could  at 
will  call  away  his  imagination  from  matters  luxurious 
or  refreshing  to  the  spirit,  from  themes  broodingly 
meditative  or  tragically  tender,  to  deal  in  a  manner  of 
fiery  energy  with  the  clash  of  war.  He  is  still  enough 
a  child  of  the  Renaissance  to  make  his  twelfth-century 
knights  and  princes  quote  Homer  in  their  taunts  and 
counter-taunts;  but  in  the  three-and-a-half  scenes 
which  he  wrote  he  makes  us  feel  his  Stephen,  defiant 
in  defeat,  a  real  elemental  force  and  not  a  mere  mouther 
of  valiant  rhetoric,  fine  and  concentrated  as  the  rhetoric 
sometimes  is,  as  for  instance  when  an  enemy  taimts 
him  with  being  disarmed  and  helpless  and  he  cries  back, 
'What  weapons  has  the  lion  but  himself?' 

In  persuading  Keats  to  work  with  him  on  a  tragedy 
for  the  stage,  Brown  had  had  the  entirely  laudable  motive 
of  putting  his  friend  in  the  way  of  earning  money  for 
them  both.  But  what  would  we  not  have  given  that 
the  time  and  labour  thus,  as  it  turned  out,  thrown  away 
should  have  yielded  us  from  Keats's  self  another  Isa- 
bella  or  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  or  a  finished  Eve  of  St  Mark,  or 
even  another  Lamia?    Brown's  next  piece  of  suggestion 


444  THE  CAP  AND  BELLS 

and  would-be  help  was  far  more  unfortunate  still.  We 
have  seen  how  in  the  unhappy  weeks  after  Keats's 
return  from  Winchester  in  October,  he  spent  his  morn- 
ings in  Brown^s  company  spinning  the  verses  of  a  comic 
and  satiric  fairy  tale  the  scheme  of  which  they  had 
concocted  together, — The  Cap  and  Bells  or  The  Jeal- 
ousies. The  idea  of  the  friends  in  this  was  no  doubt 
to  throw  a  challenge  to  Byron,  the  first  cantos  of  whose 
Don  Juan  had  lately  been  launched  upon  a  dazzled  and 
scandalised  world.  Byron's  genius,  the  spirit,  that  is, 
of  brilliant  devilry  and  worldly  mockery  which  was 
the  sincerest  part  of  his  genius,  with  his  rich  experiences 
of  life,  travel  and  society,  of  passion  and  dissipation  and 
the  extremes  of  fame  and  obloquy,  and  his  incomparable 
address  and  versatility  in  playing  tricks  of  legerdemain 
with  ideas  and  language,  had  here  all  found  their  perfect 
opportunity  for  display.  Attempts  at  worldly  banter 
and  satire  by  the  tender-hearted,  intensely  loving  and 
imagining  Keats,  with  his  narrow  and  in  the  main  rather 
second-rate  social  experience,  were  never  more  than 
wry-mouthed  as  I  have  called  them,  ineffectual,  and 
essentially  against  the  grain. 

His  collaborator  Brown  imagined  he  had  a  gift  for 
satiric  fairy  tales,  but  his  recorded  efforts  in  that  kind 
are  silly  and  dull  as  well  as  inclining  to  coarseness. 
What  happier  result  could  be  expected  from  their  new 
joint  work  than  that  which  posterity  deplores  in  The 
Cap  and  Bells  ?  The  story  is  of  an  Indian  Faery  emperor 
Elfinan, — a  name  suggested  by  Spenser, — enamoured  of 
an  English  maiden  Bertha  Pearl, — the  very  Bertha  of 
The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  resuscitated  to  oiu*  amazement, — 
but  having  for  political  reasons  to  seek  in  marriage  a 
Faery  princess  Bellanaine,  who  herself  is  in  love  with  an 
English  youth  named  Hubert.  The  eighty-eight  stanzas 
which  Keats  wrote  on  those  autumn  mornings  in  Brown's 
room  carry  the  tale  no  farther  than  Elfinan's  despatching 
his  chancellor  Crafticanto  on  an  embassy  to  fetch  Bella- 
naine on  an  aerial  journey  from  her  home  in  Imaus, 
his  consultation  with  his  magician  Hum  as  to  the  means 


WHY  A  FAILURE  445 

of  escaping  the  marriage  and  conveying  himself  secretly 
to  England,  his  departure,  and  the  arrival  of  Bellanaine 
and  her  escort  to  find  the  palace  empty  and  the  emperor 
flown.  How  the  seriously,  perhaps  tragically,  conceived 
Bertha  of  St  Mark's  Eve,  with  the  mystic  book  fated  to 
have  influence  on  her  life,  could  have  been  worked,  as 
they  were  evidently  meant  to  be  worked,  into  this  new 
ridiculous  narrative,  we  cannot  guess,  nor  how  the 
relations  of  Bellanaine  with  her  mortal  lover  would 
have  been  managed. 

Before  Keats's  deepening  despondency  and  reckless- 
ness caused  him  to  drop  writing  altogether,  which 
apparently  happened  early  in  December,  he  was  evi- 
dently out  of  conceit  with  The  Cap  and  Bells}  One  of 
the  most  imfortunate  things  about  the  attempt  is  the 
choice  of  the  Spenserian  stanza  for  its  metre.  Keats 
had  probably  wished  to  avoid  seeming  merely  to  imitate 
Byron,  as  he  might  have  seemed  to  do  had  he  written 
in  the  ottava  rima  of  Don  Juan,  the  one  perfectly  fit 
measure  for  such  a  blend  of  fantasy  and  satire  as  he 
was  attempting.  But  not  even  Keats's  power  over  the 
Spenserian  stanza  could  make  it  a  fit  vehicle  for  his 
purpose.  Thomson  and  Shenstone  had  used  it  in  work 
of  mild  and  leisurely  playfulness,  but  to  bite  in  satire  or 
sting  in  epigram  it  cannot  effectively  be  bent.  To  my 
sense  the  precedent  most  in  Keats's  mind  was  not  these, 
but  the  before-mentioned  translation  of  Wieland's 
Oheron  by  Sotheby.  Sotheby  had  invented  a  modified 
form  of  the  Spenserian  stanza  riming  abhaccddc  instead 
of  abcbhdhdd  and  keeping  the  final  alexandrine.  Much 
of  the  machinery  and  spirit  of  The  Cap  and  Bells — ^the 
magic  journeys  through  the  air — the  comic  atmosphere 
and  adventures  of  the  courts — are  closely  akin  to  the 
jocular  parts  of  this  Oheron.  Some  of  the  passages  of 
mere  fun  and  playfulness  are  pleasant  enough,  like  that 
description  of  a  dilapidated  hackney  coach  (much 
resembling  the  four-wheeler  of  our  youth)  which  Hunt 
selected  to  publish  in  the  Indicator  while  Keats  was 

1  See  the  letter  to  Taylor  quoted  above,  pp.  380,  381. 


446  FLASHES  OF  BEAUTY 

Ijdng  sick  in  his  house  the  next  year:  but  the  attempts 
at  social  satire  are  almost  always  feeble  and  tiresome, 
and  still  more  so  those  at  political  satire,  turning  for 
the  most  part  rather  obscurely  on  the  scandals,  then 
at  their  height,  attending  the  relations  of  the  Prince 
and  Princess  of  Wales.  In  the  faery  narrative  itself 
there  break  forth  momentary  flashes  from  the  true 
genius  of  the  poet,  such  as  might  delight  the  reader  if 
he  could  lose  his  sense  of  irritation  at  the  rubbish  from 
amidst  which  they  gleam.  As  thus,  of  the  princess's 
flight  through  the  air  (was  Keats  thinking,  in  the  first 
line,  of  the  children  carried  heavenward  by  angels  in 
Orcagna's  Triumph  of  Death  ?) 

As  in  old  pictures  tender  cherubim 

A  child's  soul  thro'  the  sapphir'd  canvas  bear. 

So,  thro'  a  real  heaven,  on  they  swim 

With  the  sweet  princess  on  her  plumag'd  lair. 

Speed  giving  to  the  winds  her  lustrous  hair. 

Or  this,  telling  how  Bertha  of  Canterbury,  in  Keats's 
queer  new  conception  of  her,  was  really  a  changeling 
born  in  the  jungle: — 

She  is  a  changeling  of  my  management; 
She  was  born  at  midnight  in  an  Indian  wild; 
Her  mother's  screams  with  the  striped  tiger's  blent. 
While  the  torch-bearing  slaves  a  halloo  sent 
Into  the  jungles. 

Or  again,  some  of  the  stanzas  describing  the  welcome 
prepared  in  Elfinan's  capital  for  the  faery  princess  after 
her  flight:  note  in  the  last  the  persistence  with  which 
Keats  carries  into  these  incongruous  climates  his  passion 
for  the  English  spring  flowers: — 

The  mom  is  full  of  holiday;  loud  bells 
With  rival  clamours  ring  from  every  spire; 
Cunningly-station'd  music  dies  and  swells 
In  echoing  places;  when  the  winds  respire. 
Light  flags  stream  out  like  gauzy  tongues  of  fire; 
A  metropolitan  murmur,  lifeful,  warm,  •*) 
Comes  from  the  northern  suburbs;  rich  attire 
Freckles  with  red  and  gold  the  moving  swarm; 
While  here  and  there  clear  trumpets  blow  a  keen  alarm. 


RECAST  OF  HYPERION  447 

And  again: — 

As  flowers  turn  their  faces  to  the  sun, 
So  on  our  flight  with  hungry  eyes  they  gaze, 
And,  as  we  shap'd  our  course,  this,  that  way  run. 
With  mad-cap  pleasure,  or  hand-clasp'd  amaze; 
Sweet  in  the  air  a  mild-ton'd  music  plays. 
And  progresses  through  its  own  labyrinth; 
Buds  gather'd  from  the  green  spring's  middle-days. 
They  scattered, — daisy,  primrose,  hyacinth, — 
Or  round  white  columns  wreath'd  from  capital  to  plinth. 

After  his  mornings  spent  in  Brown's  company  over 
the  strained  frivolities  of  The  Cap  and  Bells,  Keats  was 
in  the  same  weeks  striving,  alone  with  himseK  of  an 
evening,  to  utter  the  new  thoughts  on  life  and  poetry 
which  he  foimd  taking  shape  in  the  depths  of  his  being. 
He  took  up  again  the  abandoned  Hyperion,  and  began"^ 
rewriting  it  no  longer  as  a  direct  narrative,  but  as  a 
vision  shewn  and  interpreted  by  a  supernatural  moni- 
tress  acting  to  him  somewhat  the  same  part  as  Virgil 
acts  to  Dante.  In  altering  the  form  and  structiu-e  of 
the  poem  Keats  also  takes  pains  to  alter  its  style,  de- 
Miltonizing  and  de-latinizing,  sometimes  terribly  to  their 
disadvantage,  the  passages  which  he  takes  over  from 
the  earher  version.  It  is  not  in  these,  it  is  in  the  tw^o 
hundred  and  seventy  lines  of  its  wholly  new  preamble 
or  introduction  that  the  value  of  the  altered  poem  lies. 

The  reader  remembers  how  Keats  had  broken  off  his 
w^ork  on  the  original  Hyperion  at  the  point  where 
Mnemosyne,  goddess  of  Memory  and  mother  of  the 
Muses,  is  enkindling  the  brain  of  Apollo  by  mysteriously 
imparting  to  him  her  ancient  wisdom  and  all-embracing 
knowledge.  Following  a  clue  which  he  had  found  in 
a  Latin  book  of  mythology  he  had  lately  bought,^  he 
now  identifies  this  Greek  Mnemosyne  with  the  Roman 
Moneta,  goddess  of  warning  or  admonition;  and  being 
possibly  also  aware  that  the  temple  of  Juno  Moneta  on 

*  Auctorp4i  Mythoffraphi  Latini,  ed.  Van  Staveren,  Leyden,  1742.  Keats's 
copy  of  the  book  was  bought  by  him  in  1819,  and  passed  after  his  death 
into  the  hands  first  of  Brown,  and  afterwards  of  Archdeacon  Bailey 
(Houghton  MSS.).  The  passage  about  Moneta  which  had  wrought  in 
Keats's  mind  occurs  at  p.  4,  in  the  notes  to  Hyginus. 


448  ITS  LEADING  IDEAS 

the  Capitol  at  Rome  was  not  far  from  that  of  Saturn, 
makes  his  Mnemosyne-Moneta  the  priestess  and  guardian 
of  Saturn^s  temple.  His  vision  takes  him  first  into  a 
grove  or  garden  of  trees  and  flowers  and  fountains,  with 
a  feast  of  summer  fruits  spread  on  the  moss  before  an 
embowered  arbour.  The  events  that  follow,  and  the 
converse  held  between  the  poet  and  the  priestess,  are 
in  their  ethical  and  allegoric  meanings  at  many  points 
obscure,  and  capable,  like  all  S3anbols  that  are  truly 
symbolic,  of  various  interpretations.  But  the  leading 
ideas  they  embody  can  be  recognised  clearly  enough. 

They  are  primarily  the  same  ideas,  developed  in  a 
deeper  and  more  sombre  spirit,  as  had  been  present  in 
Keats's  mind  almost  from  the  beginning:  the  idea  that 
in  the  simple  delights  of  nature  and  of  art  as  unre- 
flectingly felt  in  youth  there  is  no  abiding  place  for 
the  poetic  spirit,  that  from  the  enjoyment  of  such  delights 
it  must  rise  to  thoughts  higher  and  more  austere  and 
prompting  to  more  arduous  tasks:  the  further  idea 
that  to  fit  it  for  such  tasks  two  things  above  all  are 
necessary,  growth  in  human  sympathy  through  the 
putting  down  of  self,  and  growth  in  knowledge  and 
wisdom  through  strenuous  study  and  meditation.  Such 
ideas  had  already  been  thrown  out  by  Keats  in  Sleep 
and  Poetry;  they  had  been  developed  with  much  more 
fullness,  though  in  a  manner  made  obscure  from  re- 
dundance of  imagery,  in  Endymion,  especially  in  the 
third  book:  they  had  been  expressed  with  a  difference 
under  the  new  and  clearer  symbolism  of  the  Two 
Chambers  of  Thought  in  Keats's  letter  to  Reynolds 
from  Teignmouth.  About  the  same  hour,  the  hour,  as 
I  think,  of  the  finest  achievement  of  Keats^s  genius  as 
well  as  of  its  highest  promise, — there  had  appeared  in 
his  letters  and  some  of  his  verses  the  quite  new  idea, 
which  would  have  been  inconceivable  to  him  a  year 
earlier,  of  questioning  whether  poetry  was  a  worthy 
pursuit  at  all  in  a  world  full  of  pain  and  destruction. 
Musing  beside  the  sea  on  a  calm  evening  of  April,  he 
anticipates  the  Tennysonian  vision  of  'nature,  red  in 


THEIR  HISTORY  IN  KEATS'S  MIND     449 

tooth  and  claw  With  ravine/  In  letters  written  during 
the  next  few  weeks  he  insists  over  and  over  again  alike 
upon  the  acuteness  of  his  new  sense  that  the  world  is 
'full  of  Misery  and  Heartbreak,  Pain,  Sickness  and 
Oppression/  and  upon  the  poet^s  need  of  knowledge, 
and  again  knowledge,  and  ever  more  knowledge,  to  take 
away  the  heat  and  fever  and  ease  Hhe  Burden  of  the 
Mystery/  The  first  passage  that  shows  the  dawn  of  a 
desire  in  his  mind  to  do  good  to  a  suffering  world  by 
means  possibly  other  than  his  art  is  that  well-known 
and  deeply  si^iificant  one: — 

I  find  earlier  days  are  gone  by — I  find  that  I  can  have  no 
enjoyment  in  the  world  but  continual  drinking  of  knowledge. 
I  find  there  is  no  worthy  pursuit  but  the  idea  of  doing  some  good 
to  the  world.  Some  do  it  with  their  society — some  with  their 
wit — some  with  their  benevolence — some  with  a  sort  of  power 
of  conferring  pleasure  and  good  humour  on  all  they  meet — and 
in  a  thousand  ways,  all  dutiful  to  the  command  of  great  Nature 
— there  is  but  one  way  for  me.  The  road  lies  through  application, 
study,  and  thought.     I  will  pursue  it. 

The  next  time  he  expresses  such  an  idea,  it  comes 
struck  from  him  in  a  darker  mood  and  in  phrases  of 
greater  poignancy: — 'were  it  in  my  choice,  I  would 
reject  a  Petrarcal  coronation, — on  account  of  my  dying 
day,  and  because  women  have  cancers  ...  I  am  never 
alone  without  rejoicing  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
death — ^without  placing  my  ultimate  in  the  glory  of 
dying  for  a  great  human  purpose.' 

The  pressure  of  the  sense  of  human  misery,  the  hunger 
of  the  soul  for  knowledge  and  vision  to  lighten  it,  though 
they  naturally  do  not  colour  his  impersonal  work  of 
the  next  year  and  a  half,  nevertheless  set  their  mark, 
the  former  strain  in  especial,  upon  his  most  deeply  felt 
meditative  verse,  as  in  the  odes  to  the  Nightingale  and 
the  Grecian  Urn,  and  reappear  occasionally  in  his 
private  confessions  to  his  friends.  Now,  after  intense 
experience  both  of  personal  sorrow  and  of  poetic  toil, 
and  under  the  strain  of  incipient  disease  and  consuming 
passion,  it  is  borne  in  upon  his  soHtary  hours  that  such 


450    PREAMBLE:    ANOTHER  FEAST  OF  FRUITS 

poetry  as  he  has  written,  the  irresponsible  poetry  of 
beauty  and  romance,  has  been  mere  idle  dreaming,  a 
refuge  of  the  spirit  from  its  prime  duty  of  sharing  and 
striving  to  alleviate  the  troubles  of  the  world.  It 
seems  to  him  that  every  ordinary  man  and  woman  is 
worth  more  to  mankind  than  such  a  dreamer.  If  poetry 
is  to  be  worth  anything  to  the  world,  it  must  be  a 
different  kind  of  poetry  from  this:  the  true  poet  is 
something  the  very  opposite  of  the  mere  dreamer:  he 
is  one  who  has  prepared  himself  through  self-renuncia- 
tion and  arduous  effort  and  extreme  probation  of  the 
spirit  to  receive  and  impart  the  highest  wisdom,  the 
wisdom  that  comes  from  full  knowledge  of  the  past 
and  foresight  into  the  future.  Of  such  wisdom  The 
Fall  of  Hyperion  in  its  amended  form,  as  revealed  and 
commented  by  Mnemosyne-Moneta,  the  great  priestess 
and  prophetess,  remembrancer  and  admonisher  in  one, 
was  meant  to  be  a  sample, — or  such  an  attempt  at  a 
sample  as  Keats  at  the  present  stage  of  his  mental 
growth  could  supply.  But  the  attempt  soon  proved 
beyond  his  strength  and  was  abandoned. 

The  preamble,  or  induction,  he  had  finished;  and  this, 
if  we  leave  out  the  futile  eighteen  lines  with  which  it 
begins,  contains  much  lofty  thought  conveyed  in  noble 
imagery  and  in  a  style  of  blank  verse  quite  his  own 
and  independent  of  all  models.  Take  the  feast  of  fruits, 
symbolic  of  the  poet's  early  unreflecting  joys,  and  the 
new  thirst  for  some  finer  and  more  inspiring  elixir  which 
follows  it: — 

On  a  mound 
Of  moss,  was  spread  a  feast  of  summer  fruits. 
Which,  nearer  seen,  seem'd  refuse  of  a  meal 
By  angel  tasted  or  our  Mother  Eve; 
For  empty  shells  were  scattered  on  the  grass. 
And  grape-stalks  but  half  bare,  and  remnants  more 
Sweet-smelling,  whose  pure  kinds  I  could  not  know. 
Still  was  more  plenty  than  the  fabled  horn 
Thrice  emptied  could  pour  forth  at  banqueting. 
For  Proserpine  return'd  to  her  own  fields. 
Where  the  white  heifers  low.     And  appetite. 


THE  SANCTUARY  451 

More  yearning  than  on  earth  I  ever  felt. 
Growing  within,  I  ate  deUciously, — 
And,  after  not  long,  thirsted;  for  thereby 
Stood  a  cool  vessel  of  transparent  juice 
Sipp'd  by  the  wandered  bee,  the  which  I  took. 
And  pledging  all  the  mortals  of  the  world, 
And  all  the  dead  whose  names  are  in  our  lips. 
Drank.     That  full  draught  is  parent  of  my  theme. 

The  draught  plunges  him  into  a  profound  sleep,  from 
which  he  awakens  a  changed  being  among  utterly 
changed  surroundings.  The  world  in  which  he  finds 
himself  is  no  longer  a  delicious  garden  but  an  ancient 
and  august  temple, — ^the  noblest  and  most  nobly  de- 
scribed architectural  vision  in  all  Keats^s  writings: — 

I  lookM  around  upon  the  curved  sides 

Of  an 'old  sanctuary,  with  roof  august, 

Builded  so  high,  it  seemed  that  filmed  clouds 

Might  spread  beneath  as  o*er  the  stars  of  heaven. 

So  old  the  place  was,  I  remember'd  none 

The  like  upon  the  earth:  what  I  had  seen 

Of  grey  cathedrals,  buttress'd  walls,  rent  towers. 

The  superannuations  of  sunk  realms, 

Or  Nature's  rocks  toil'd  hard  in  waves  and  winds, 

Seem'd  but  the  faulture  of  decrepit  things 

To  that  eternal  domed  monument. 

The  sights  the  poet  sees  and  the  experiences  which 
befall  him  within  this  temple;  the  black  gates  closed 
against  the  east, — which  must  symbolize  the  forgotten 
past  of  the  world;  the  stupendous  image  enthroned 
aloft  in  the  west,  with  the  altar  at  its  foot,  approach- 
able only  by  an  interminable  flight  of  steps;  the  wreaths 
of  incense  veiling  the  altar  and  spreading  a  mysterious 
sense  of  happiness;  the  voice  of  one  ministering  at  the 
altar  and  shrouded  in  the  incense — a  voice  at  once  of 
invitation  and  menace,  bidding  the  dreamer  climb  to 
the  summit  of  the  steps  by  a  given  moment  or  he  will 
perish  utterly;  the  sense  of  icy  numbness  and  death 
which  comes  upon  him  before  he  can  reach  even  the 
lowest  step;  the  new  life  that  pours  into  him  as  he 
touches  the  step;  his  accosting  of  the  mysterious  veiled 


452  THE  ADMONITION 

priestess  who  stands  on  the  altar  platform  when  he  has 
climbed  to  it;  all  these  phases  of  the  poet's  ordeal  are 
impressively  told,  but  are  hard  to  interpret  otherwise 
than  dubiously  and  vaguely.  Matters  become  more 
definite  a  moment  afterwards,  when  in  answer  to  the 
poet's  questions  the  priestess  tells  him  that  none  can 
climb  to  the  altar  beside  which  he  stands, — ^the  altar, 
we  must  suppose,  of  historic  and  prophetic  knowledge 
where  alone,  after  due  sacrifice  of  himself,  the  poet  can 
find  true  inspiration, — except  those 

to  whom  the  miseries  of  the  world 
Are  misery  and  will  not  let  them  rest. 

The  poet  pleads  that  there  are  thousands  of  ordinary 
men  and  women  who  feel  the  sorrows  of  the  world  and 
do  their  best  to  mitigate  them,  and  is  answered, — 

'Those  whom  thou  spakest  of  are  no  visionaries' 

Rejoined  that  voice;  *  they  are  no  dreamers  weak; 

They  seek  no  wonder  but  the  human  face. 

No  music  but  a  happy-noted  voice: 

They  come  not  here,  they  have  no  thought  to  come; 

And  thou  art  here,  for  thou  art  less  than  they. 

What  benefit  canst  thou  do,  or  all  thy  tribe. 

To  the  great  world  ?    Thou  art  a  dreaming  thing, 

A  fever  of  thyself:  think  of  the  earth; 

What  bliss,  even  in  hope,  is  there  for  thee  ? 

What  haven  ?  every  creature  hath  its  home. 

Every  sole  man  hath  days  of  joy  and  pain. 

Whether  his  labours  be  sublime  or  low — 

The  pain  alone,  the  joy  alone,  distinct: 

Only  the  dreamer  venoms  aU  his  days. 

Bearing  more  woe  than  all  his  sins  deserve. 

What  a  pilgrimage  has  the  soul  of  Keats  gone  through, 
when  he  utters  this  heartrending  cry,  from  the  day, 
barely  three  years  before,  when  he  was  never  tired  of 
singing  by  anticipation  the  joys  and  glories  of  the  poetic 
life  and  of  the  end  that  awaits  it: — 

These  are  the  living  pleasures  of  the  bard, 

But  richer  far  posterity's  award. 

What  shall  he  murmur  with  his  latest  breath. 

When  his  proud  eye  looks  through  the  film  of  death  ? 


THE  MONITRESS  453 

The  truth  is  that,  in  all  this,  Keats  in  his  depression  of 
mind  and  body  has  become  fiercely  unjust  to  his  own 
achievements  and  their  value:  for  if  posterity  were 
asked,  would  it  not  reply  that  the  things  of  sheer  beauty 
his  youth  has  left  us,  draughts  drawn  from  the  inmost 
wells  of  nature  and  antiquity  and  romance,  are  of 
greater  solace  and  refreshment  to  his  kind  than  any- 
thing he  could  have  been  likely  to  achieve  by  deHberate 
effort  in  defiance  of  his  natural  genius  or  in  premature 
anticipation  of  its  matiuity? 

At  this  point  there  follows  a  fretful  passage,  ill-written 
or  rather  only  roughly  drafted,  and  therefore  not  in- 
cluded in  the  transcripts  of  the  fragments  by  his  friends, 
in  which  his  monitress  affirms  contemptuously  the  guK 
that  separates  the  romantic  dreamer  froni  the  true  poet. 
He  accepts  the  reproof  and  the  threatened  punishment, 
the  more  willingly  if  they  are  to  extend  to  certain 
^hectorers  in  proud  bad  verse*  (he  means  Byron)  who 
have  aroused  his  spleen.  Reverting  to  a  loftier  strain, 
and  acknowledging  the  grace  she  has  so  far  shown  him, 
the  poet  asks  his  monitress  to  reveal  herseK.  He  had 
probably  long  before  been  impressed  by  engravings  of 
the  well-known  ancient  statue  of  the  seated  Mnemo- 
syne sitting  forward  with  her  chin  resting  on  her 
hand,  her  arm  and  shoulder  heavily  swathed  in 
drapery:  but  his  vision  of  her  here  seems  wholly  inde- 
pendent, and  is  noble  and  mystically  haunting.  When 
she  has  signified  to  him  in  a  softened  voice  that  the 
gigantic  image  above  the  altar  is  that  of  Saturn,  and 
that  the  scenes  of  the  world's  past  she  is  about  to  evoke 
before  him  are  those  of  the  fall  of  Saturn,  the  poet 
relates : — 

As  near  as  an  immortars  sphered  words 
Could  to  a  mother's  soften  were  these  last: 
And  yet  I  had  a  terror  of  her  robes. 
And  chiefly  of  the  veils  that  from  her  brow 
Hung  pale,  and  curtained  her  in  mysteries, 
That  made  my  heart  too  small  to  hold  its  blood. 
This  saw  that  Goddess,  and  with  sacred  hand 
Parted  the  veils.     Then  saw  I  a  wan  face. 


454  THE  ATTEMPT  BREAKS  OFF 

Not  pin'd  by  human  sorrows,  but  bright-blanch*d 

By  an  immortal  sickness  which  kills  not; 

It  works  a  constant  change,  which  happy  death 

Can  put  no  end  to;  deathwards  progressing 

To  no  death  was  that  visage;  it  had  past  J 

The  lilly  and  the  snow;  and  beyond  these 

I  must  not  think  now,  though  I  saw  that  face. 

But  for  her  eyes  I  should  have  fled  away; 

They  held  me  back  with  a  benignant  light. 

Soft,  mitigated  by  divinest  lids 

Half-clos'd,  and  visionless  entire  they  seem*d 

Of  all  external  things;  they  saw  me  not. 

But  in  blank  splendour  beamM,  like  the  mild  moon. 

Who  comforts  those  she  sees  not,  who  knows  not 

What  eyes  are  upward  cast. 

The  aspirant  now  adoringly  entreats  her  to  disclose  the 
tragedy  that  he  perceives  to  be  working  in  her  brain: 
she  consents,  and  from  this  point  begins  the  original 
Hyperion  re-cast  and  narrated  as  a  vision  within  the 
main  vision,  with  comments  put  into  the  mouth  of  the 
prophetess.  But  the  scheme,  which  under  no  circum- 
stances, one  would  say,  could  have  been  a  prosperous 
one,  was  soon  abandoned,  and  this,  the  last  of  Keats^s 
great  fragments,  breaks  off  near  the  beginning  of  the 
second  book. 


CHAPTER  XV 

FEBRUARY-AUGUST  1820:  HAMPSTEAD  AND  KENTISH  TOWN: 
PUBLICATION  OF  LAMIA   VOLUME 

Letters  from  the  sick-bed — To  Fanny  Brawne — To  James  Rice — Barry 
Cornwall — Hopes  of  returning  health — Haydon's  private  view — 
Improvement  not  maintained — Summer  at  Kentish  Town — Kindness 
of  Leigh  Himt — Misery  and  jealousy — Severn  and  Mrs  Gisbome — 
Invitation  from  Shelley — Keats  on  The  Cenci — La  Belle  Dame  pub- 
lished— A  disfigured  version — The  Lamia  volume  published — Charles 
Lamb's  appreciation — The  New  Monthly — Other  favourable  reviews — 
Taylor  and  Blackwood — A  skirmish — Impenitence — And  impertinence 
— ^Jeffrey  in  the  Edinburgh — Appreciation  full  though  tardy — Fury  of 
Bjnron — Shelley  on  Hyperion — And  on  Keats  in  general — Impressions 
of  Crabb  Robinson. 

Such  and  so  gloomy,  although  with  no  ignoble  gloom,  had 
been  Keats's  deeper  thoughts  on  poetty  and  life,  and  such 
the  imagery  under  which  he  figured  them,  during  the 
last  weeks  when  the  state  of  his  health  enabled  his  mind 
to  work  with  anything  approaching  its  natural  power. 
From  the  night  of  his  seizure  on  February  3rd  1820,  which 
was  three  months  after  his  twenty-fourth  birthday,  he 
never  wrote  verse  again:  unless  indeed  the  lines  foimd  on 
the  margin  of  his  manuscript  of  The  Cap  and  Bells  were 
written  from  his  sick-bed  and  in  a  moment  of  bitterness 
addressed  in  his  mind  to  Fanny  Brawue:  but  from  a 
certain  pitch  and  formality  of  style  in  them,  I  should 
take  them  rather  to  be  meant  for  putting  into  the  mouth 
of  one  of  the  characters  in  some  such  historical  play  as  he 
had  been  meditating  in  the  weeks  before  Christmas: — 

This  living  hand,  now  warm  and  capable 
Of  earnest  grasping,  would,  if  it  were  cold 
455 


456         LETTERS  FROM  THE  SICK-BED 

And  in  the  icy  silence  of  the  tomb. 

So  haunt  thy  days  and  chill  thy  dreaming  nights 

That  thou  would  wish  thine  own  heart  dry  of  blood 

So  in  my  veins  red  life  might  stream  again, 

And  thou  be  conscience-calm'd — see  here  it  is —    J 

I  hold  it  towards  you. 

For  several  days  after  the  haemorrhage  he  was  kept 
to  his  room  and  his  bed,  and  for  nearly  two  months  had 
to  lead  a  strictly,  invalid  life.  At  first  he  could  bear 
no  one  in  the  room  except  the  doctor  and  Brown. 
'While  I  waited  on  him  day  and  night/  testifies  Brown, 
'his  instinctive  generosity,  his  acceptance  of  my  offices, 
by  a  glance  of  his  eye,  a  motion  of  his  hand,  made  me 
regard  my  mechanical  duty  as  absolutely  nothing  com- 
pared to  his  silent  acknowledgment.'  '  (How  often  have 
these  words  come  home  to  the  heart  of  the  present 
writer  in  days  when  he  used  to  be  busy  about  the  mute 
sick-bed  of  another  of  these  shining  ones !)  Severn, 
nursing  Keats  later  under  conditions  even  more  trjdng 
and  hopeless,  bears  similar  testimony  to  his  unabated 
charm  and  sweetness  in  suffering.  Almost  from  the 
first  he  was  able  to  write  little  letters  to  his  sister  Fanny, 
and  is  careful  to  give  them  a  cheering  and  re-assuring 
turn.  When  after  some  days  he  is  down  on  a  sofa-bed 
made  up  for  him  in  the  front  parlour  he  tells  her  what 
an  improvement  it  is: — 

Besides  I  see  all  that  passes — ^for  instance  now,  this  morning 
— if  I  had  been  in  my  own  room  I  should  not  have  seen  the  coals 
brought  in.  On  Sunday  between  the  hours  of  twelve  and  one 
I  descried  a  Pot  boy.  I  conjectured  it  might  be  the  one  o*clock 
beer — Old  women  with  bobbins  and  red  cloaks  and  unpresuming 
bonnets  I  see  creeping  about  the  heath.  Gipseys  after  hare 
skins  and  silver  spoons.  Then  goes  by  a  fellow  with  a  wooden 
clock  under  his  arm  that  strikes  a  hundred  and  more.  Then 
comes  the  old  French  emigrant  (who  has  been  very  well  to  do 
in  France)  with  his  hands  joined  behind  on  his  hips,  and  his  face 
full  of  political  schemes.  Then  passes  Mr  David  Lewis,  a  very 
good-natured,  good-looking  old  gentleman  who  has  been  very 
kind  to  Tom  and  George  and  me.  As  for  those  fellows  the  Brick- 
makers  they  are  always  passing  to  and  fro.  I  mustn't  forget  the 
two  old  maiden  Ladies  in  Well  Walk  who  have  a  Lap  dog  between 


TO  FANNY  BRAWNE  457 

them  that  they  are  very  anxious  about.  It  is  a  corpulent  Little 
beast  whom  it  is  necessary  to  coax  along  with  an  ivory-tipp'd 
cane.  Carlo  our  Neighbour  Mrs  Brawne's  dog  and  it  meet  some- 
times. Lappy  thinks  Carlo  a  devil  of  a  fellow  and  so  do  his 
Mistresses. 

Very  soon  his  betrothed  was  allowed  to  pay  him 
little  visits  from  next  door,  and  he  was  able  to  take 
pleasure  in  these  and  in  a  constant  interchange  of  notes 
with  her.  He  tells  her  of  his  thoughts  and  some  of  his 
words  (which  are  not  quite  the  same  as  Brown  puts  in 
his  mouth)  at  the  moment  of  his  seizure: — 

You  must  believe — ^you  shall,  you  will — that  I  can  do  nothing, 
say  nothing,  think  nothing  of  you  but  what  has  its  spring  in  the 
Love  which  has  so  long  been  my  pleasure  and  torment.  On  the 
night  I  was  taken  ill — when  so  violent  a  rush  of  blood  came  to 
my  Lungs  that  I  felt  nearly  suffocated — I  assure  you  I  felt  it 
possible  I  might  not  sur\'ive,  and  at  that  moment  thought  of 
nothing  but  you.  \Mien  I  said  to  Brown  *this  is  unfortunate* 
I  thought  of  you.  'Tis  true  that  since  the  first  two  or  three  days 
other  subjects  have  entered  my  head. 

On  the  whole  his  love-thoughts  keep  peaceable  and  con- 
tented, and  his  jealousies  are  for  the  moment  at  rest. 
But  he  has  to  stmggle  with  the  sense  that  considering 
his  health  and  circumstances  he  is  bound  in  fairness  to 
release  her  from  her  engagement:  an  idea  which  to  her 
credit  she  seems  steadily  to  have  refused  to  entertain. 

My  greatest  torment  since  I  have  known  you  has  been  the 
fear  of  you  being  a  little  inclined  to  the  Cressid;  but  that  sus- 
picion I  dismiss  utterly  and  remain  happy  in  the  surety  of  your 
Love,  which  I  assure  you  is  as  much  a  wonder  to  me  as  a  delight. 
Send  me  the  words  'Good  night'  to  put  under  my  pillow.  .  .  . 

You  know  our  situation — what  hope  is  there  if  I  should  be 
recovered  ever  so  soon — my  very  health  will  not  suffer  me  to 
make  any  great  exertion.  I  am  recommended  not  even  to  read 
poetry,  much  less  write  it.  I  wish  I  had  even  a  little  hope.  I 
cannot  say  forget  me — but  I  would  mention  that  there  are  im- 
possibilities in  the  world.  No  more  of  this.  I  am  not  strong 
enough  to  be  weaned — take  no  notice  of  it  in  your  good  night. 

The  healthier  and  more  tranquil  tenor  of  his  thoughts 
and  feelings  for  the  time  is  beautifully  expressed  in 


458  TO  JAMES  RICE 

the  often  quoted  letter  written  to  James  Rice  a  fort- 
night after  his  attack: — 

I  may  say  that  for  six  months  before  I  was  taken  ill  I  had  not 
passed  a  tranquil  day.  Either  that  gloom  overspread  me,  or  I 
was  suffering  under  some  passionate  feeling,  or  if  I  turned  to 
versify,  that  acerbated  the  poison  of  either  sensation.  The 
beauties  of  nature  had  lost  their  power  over  me.  How  astonish- 
ingly (here  I  must  premise  that  illness,  as  far  as  I  can  judge  in 
so  short  a  time,  has  relieved  my  mind  of  a  load  of  deceptive 
thoughts  and  images,  and  makes  me  perceive  things  in  a  truer 
light), — how  astonishingly  does  the  chance  of  leaving  the  world 
impress  a  sense  of  its  natural  beauties  upon  us!  Like  poor 
Falstaff,  though  I  do  not  *  babble,'  I  think  of  green  fields;  I 
muse  with  the  greatest  affection  on  every  flower  I  have  known 
from  my  infancy — their  shapes  and  colours  are  as  new  to  me  as 
if  I  had  just  created  them  with  a  superhuman  fancy.  It  is 
because  they  are  connected  with  the  most  thoughtless  and  the 
happiest  moments  of  our  lives.  I  have  seen  foreign  flowers  in 
hothouses,  of  the  most  beautiful  nature,  but  I  do  not  care  a  straw 
for  them.  The  simple  flowers  of  our  Spring  are  what  I  want  to 
see  again. 

Some  time  in  the  month  he  owns  to  his  beloved  that 
the  thoughts  of  what  he  had  hoped  to  do  in  poetry 
mingle  with  his  thoughts  of  her: — 

How  illness  stands  as  a  barrier  betwixt  me  and  you!  Even 
if  I  was  well — I  must  make  myself  as  good  a  Philosopher  as 
possible.  Now  I  have  had  opportunities  of  passing  nights  anxious 
and  awake  I  have  found  other  thoughts  intrude  upon  me.  'If  I 
should  die,'  said  I  to  myself,  *I  have  left  no  immortal  work 
behind  me — nothing  to  make  my  friends  proud  of  my  memory — 
but  I  have  lov'd  the  principle  of  beauty  in  all  things,  and  if  I  had 
had  time  I  would  have  made  myself  remember'd.'  Thoughts 
like  these  came  very  feebly  whilst  I  was  in  health  and  every  pulse 
beat  for  you — now  you  divide  with  this  (may  I  say  it?)  *last 
infirmity  of  noble  minds'  all  my  reflection. 

Presently  we  learn  from  his  letters  that  Reynolds, 
Dilke,  and  one  or  two  other  friends  have  been  dropping 
in  to  see  him.  He  expresses  himself  touched  by  the 
courtesy  of  a  new  poetical  acquaintance  of  much  more 
prosperous  worldly  connexions  than  his  own,  Mr  Bryan 
Waller    Procter    (^  Barry    Comwair)    in    sending    him 


BARRY   CORNWALL  459 

copies  of  his  volumes  lately  published.  Keats  does 
not  mention  that  one  of  these  contains  a  version,  The 
Sicilian  Story,  of  the  same  tale  from  Boccaccio  as  his 
own  as  yet  unpublished  Isabella:  but  he  cannot  quite 
conceal  his  perception  of  those  qualities  in  Barry  Corn- 
wall's work,  its  prevailing  strain  of  fluent  imitative  com- 
mon-place, its  affectations  and  exaggerations  of  Hunt's 
and  his  own  leanings  towards  over-lusciousness,  which 
Shelley,  as  we  shall  see,  found  so  exasperating.  'How- 
ever,' he  adds,  Hhat  is  nothing — I  think  he  likes  poetry 
for  its  own  sake  not  his.'  ^  Before  the  end  of  the 
month  we  find  him  taking  pleasure,  as  in  earlier  Febru- 
aries,  in  the  song  of  the  thrush,  which  portends,  he 
hopes,  an  end  of  the  north-east  wind.  The  month  of 
March  brings  signs  of  gradually  returning  strength. 
Brown,  he  says,  declares  he  is  getting  stout;  and  having 
in  the  first  weeks  of  his  illness  avowed  that  he  was  so 
feeble  he  could  be  flattered  into  a  hope  in  which  faith 
had  no  part,  he  now  begins  really  to  believe  in  his  own 
recovery  and  to  let  his  thoughts  run  again  on  fame  and 
poetry.  He  writes  to  Fanny  Brawne  the  most  trustful 
and  least  agitated  of  all  his  love  letters: — 

You  uttered  a  half  complaint  once  that  I  only  lovM  your 
Beauty.  Have  I  nothing  else  then  to  love  in  you  but  that? 
Do  not  I  see  a  heart  naturally  fumishM  with  wings  imprison 
itself  with  me?  No  ill  prospect  has  been  able  to  turn  your 
thoughts  a  moment  from  me.     This  perhaps  should  be  as  much 

1 A  letter  of  Procter's  to  Keats  shows  that  he  had  been  among  Keats's 
visitors  during  the  weeks  that  followed  his  attack  of  haemorrhage  (see 
Buxton  Forman,  Complete  Works,  v.  163).  Whether  they  had  been  much 
or  at  all  acquainted  before  then  seems  uncertain,  but  Procter's  impres- 
sions of  Keats  recorded  almost  half  a  century  later  read  as  though  he  had 
known  him  while  stiU  in  health: — 

'  I  saw  him  only  two  or  three  times  before  his  departure  for  Italy.  I  was 
introduced  to  him  by  Leigh  Hunt,  and  foimd  him  very  pleasant,  and  free 
from  all  affectation  in  manner  and  opinion.  Indeed,  it  would  be  difficult 
to  discover  a  man  with  a  more  bright  and  open  countenance.  He  was 
always  ready  to  hear  and  to  reply;  to  discuss,  to  reason,  to  admit;  and 
to  join  in  serious  talk  or  common  gossip.  It  has  been  said  that  his  poetry 
was  affected  and  effeminate.  I  can  only  say  that  I  never  encountered  a 
more  manly  and  simple  young  man.  In  person  he  was  short,  and  had 
eyes  large  and  wonderfully  luminous,  and  a  resolute  bearing;  not  defiant, 
but  well  sustained.' 


460        HOPES  OF  RETURNING  HEALTH 

a  subject  of  sorrow  as  joy— but  I  will  not  talk  of  that.  Even  if 
you  did  not  love  me  I  could  not  help  an  entire  devotion  to  you: 
how  much  more  deeply  then  must  I  feel  for  you  knowing  you 
love  me.  My  Mind  has  been  the  most  discontented  and  restless  one 
that  ever  was  put  into  a  body  too  small  for  it.  I  never  felt  my 
Mind  repose  upon  anything  with  complete  and  undistracted  enjoy- 
ment— upon  no  person  but  you.  When  you  are  in  the  room  my 
thoughts  never  fly  out  of  window:  you  always  concentrate  my 
whole  senses.  The  anxiety  shown  about  our  Loves  in  your  last 
note  is  an  immense  pleasure  to  me:  however  you  must  not  suffer 
such  speculations  to  molest  you  any  more:  nor  will  I  any  more 
believe  you  can  have  the  least  pique  against  me. 

And  again:  'let  me  have  another  opportunity  of  years 
and  I  will  not  die  without  being  remembered.  Take 
care  of  yourself  dear  that  we  may  both  be  well  in  the 
summer.' 

He  began  to  get  about  again,  and  by  the  25th  of 
March  was  well  enough  to  go  into  town  to  the  private 
view  of  Haydon's  huge  picture,  finished  at  last,  of 
Christ's  Entry  into  Jerusalem.  This  was  the  occasion 
which  Haydon  in  his  autobiography  describes  in  language 
so  vivid  and  with  a  self-congratulation  so  boisterous 
and  contagious  that  it  is  impossible  in  reading  not  to 
share  his  sense  of  the  day's  triimiph.  As  in  the  case 
of  the  Elgin  marbles  three  years  earlier,  he  had  achieved 
his  object  in  the  face  of  a  thousand  difficulties  and 
enmities,  living  the  while  on  the  boimty  of  friends, 
some  of  them  rich,  others,  as  we  know,  the  reverse, 
whom  his  ardoiu*  and  importunity  had  whipped  up  to 
his  help.  At  the  last  moment  he  had  contrived  to 
scrape  together  money  enough  to  stop  the  mouths  of 
his  creditors  and  to  pay  the  cost  of  hiring  the  Egyptian 
Hall  and  hanging  up  his  gigantic  canvas  there,  with  the 
help  of  three  gigantic  guardsmen,  his  models  and  assist- 
ants; and  the  world  of  taste  and  fashion,  realising  how 
Haydon  had  been  right  and  the  established  dilettanti 
wrong  in  regard  to  the  Elgin  marbles,  were  determined 
to  be  on  the  safe  side  this  time  in  case  he  should  turn 
out  to  be  right  also  about  the  merits  of  his  own 
work. 


HAYDON'S  PRIVATE  VIEW  461 

Some  exalted  and  many  distinguished  personages  had 
been  to  see  the  picture  in  his  studio,  and  now,  on  the 
opening  day,  the  hall  was  thronged  in  answer  to  his 
invitations.  'All  the  ministers  and  their  ladies,  all 
the  foreign  ambassadors,  all  the  bishops,  all  the  beauties 
in  high  life,  all  the  geniuses  in  town,  and  eveiybody  of 
any  note,  were  invited  and  came.  .  .  .  The  room  was 
full.  Keats  and  HazHtt  were  up  in  a  corner,  really 
rejoicing.'  Hazlitt  expressed  in  the  Edinburgh  Review 
for  the  following  August  a  tempered,  far  from  undis- 
criminating  admiration  of  certain  qualities  in  the 
painting.  Keats  himself  merely  mentions  to  his  sister 
Fanny,  without  comment,  the  fact  of  his  having  been 
there.  One  wonders  whether  he  witnessed  the  scene 
which  Haydon  goes  on  in  his  effective  way  to  narrate. 

He  had  tried  to  treat  the  head  of  Christ  unconvention- 
ally, had  painted  and  repainted  it,  and  was  nervous  and 
dissatisfied  over  the  result.  The  crowd  seemed  doubtful 
too.  'Everybody  seemed  afraid,  when  in  walked,  with 
all  the  dignity  of  her  majestic  presence,  Mrs  Siddons, 
like  a  Ceres  or  a  Juno.  The  whole  room  remained  dead 
silent,  and  allowed  her  to  think.  After  a  few  minutes 
Sir  George  Beaumont,  who  was  extremely  anxious,  said 
in  a  very  deUcate  manner,  "How  do  you  like  the 
Christ?''  Everybody  listened  for  her  reply.  After  a 
moment,  in  a  deep,  loud,  tragic  tone  she  said,  "It  is 
completely  successful."  I  was  then  presented  with  all 
the  ceremonies  of  a  levee,  and  she  invited  me  to  her 
house  in  an  awful  tone.'  ...  I  think  it  is  not  recorded 
whether  Northcote's  acid  comment  in  a  different  sense, 
*Mr  Haydon,  your  ass  is  the  Savioiu"  of  your  picture,' 
was  made  on  this  famous  occasion  or  privately.  Certainly 
the  ass,  judging  by  photographs  of  the  picture  as  it  now 
hangs  in  a  wrecked  condition  at  Cincinnati,  is  the  object 
that  first  takes  the  eye  with  its  black  ears  and  shoulders 
strongly  relieved  against  the  white  drapery  of  Christ, 
and  what  looks  like  the  realistic  treatment  of  the  creature 
in  contrast  with  the  '  ideal, '  that  is  the  vapidly  pompous 
and  pretentious,  portraiture  of  geniuses  past  and  present, 


462      IMPROVEMENT  NOT  MAINTAINED 

Newtoii;  Voltaire,  Wordsworth,   Hazlitt,  Keats,  intro- 
duced among  the  crowd  in  the  foreground.^ 

In  the  course  of  April  the  improvement  in  Keats's 
health  failed  to  maintain  itself.  We  find  him  com- 
plaining much  of  nervous  irritability  and  general  weak- 
ness. He  is  recommended,  one  would  like  to  know  by 
whom,  to  avoid  the  excitement  of  writing  or  even 
reading  poetry  and  turn  to  the  study  of  geometry — of 
all  things! — as  a  sedative.  He  has  no  strength  for  the 
walk  to  Walthamstow  to  see  his  yoimg  sister,  and  even 
shrinks  from  the  fatigue  of  going  by  coach.  Brown 
having  arranged  to  let  his  house  again  and  go  for  another 
tramp  through  Scotland — ^not,  one  would  have  said 
under  the  circumstances,  the  course  of  a  very  con- 
siderate or  solicitous  friend,  but  he  was  probably  mis- 
led by  Keats's  apparent  improvement  the  month  before 
— ^Brown  having  made  this  arrangement,  Keats,  also 
on  the  recommendation  of  the  doctors,  thinks  of  sailing 
with  him  on  the  packet  and  returning  alone,  in  hopes 
of  getting  strength  from  the  sea-trip  to  Scotland  and 
back.  This  plan,  when  it  came  to  the  point,  he  gave 
up,  and  only  accompanied  his  friend  down  the  river  as 
far  as  Gravesend.  Having  to  turn  out  of  Wentworth 
Place  in  favour  of  Brown's  summer  tenants,  he  thought 
of  taking  a  lodging  a  few  doors  from  the  house  where 
Leigh  Hunt  was  then  living  in  Kentish  Town,  then  still 
a  village  on  the  way  between  London  and  Hampstead. 
Almost  at  the  same  time  he  writes  to  Dilke  in  regard  to 
his  future  course  of  life,  'My  mind  has  been  at  work  all 
over  the  world  to  find  out  what  to  do.  I  have  my 
choice  of  three  things,  or  at  least  two,  South  America, 
or  surgeon  to  an  Indiaman;    which  last,  I  think,  will 

1  As  against  this  judgment,  formed  from  photographs  of  the  wrecked 
picture  and  from  the  general  character  of  Haydon's  work,  let  it  be  remem- 
bered that  Hazhtt,  no  mean  judge,  declares  that  the  head  of  Wordsworth 
is  of  all  his  portraits  *the  most  like  his  drooping  weight  of  thought  and 
expression.'  Lamb's  complimentary  punning  address,  In  tabvlam  eximii 
pictoris,  with  its  Enghsh  translation^  may  be  taken  as  exercises  in  friendly 
congratulation  rather  than  in  criticism.  The  picture  in  its  present  state 
is  reproduced  and  discussed  by  Mr  Louis  A.  Holman  in  the  New  York 
Bookman,  Feb.  1913,  pp.  608  sqq. 


SUMMER  AT  KENTISH  TOWN  463 

be  my  fate.'  For  the  present  he  moved  as  he  had 
proposed  to  Kentish  Town  (2  Wesleyan  Place).  Here 
he  stayed  for  six  or  seven  weeks  (approximately  May  6 
-Jime  23),  and  then,  having  suffered  a  set-back  in 
the  shape  of  two  sHght  returns  of  haemorrhage  from 
the  lung,  moved  for  the  sake  of  better  nursing  into  the 
household  of  the  ever  kind  and  affectionate,  but  not 
less  ever  feckless  and  ill-managing,  Leigh  Hunts  at  13 
Mortimer  Terrace.  With  them  he  remained  for  another 
period  of  about  seven  weeks,  ending  on  August  12th. 

Those  three  months  in  Kentish  Town  were  to  Keats 
a  time  of  distressing  weakness  and  for  the  most  part 
of  terrible  inward  fretfulness  and  despondency.  Early 
in  the  time  he  speaks  of  intending  soon  to  begin  (meaning 
begin  again)  on  The  Cap  and  Bells,  When  we  read 
those  vivid  stanzas  quoted  above  (p.  446)  describing 
the  welcome  by  the  crowd  of  princess  Bellanaine  after 
her  aerial  journey,  we  are  inevitably  reminded  of  an 
event — ^the  triumphal  approach  and  entry  of  Queen 
Caroline  into  London  from  Dover — which  happened  on 
the  9th  of  June  this  same  year.  It  would  be  tempting 
to  suppose  that  Keats  may  have  witnessed  the  event 
and  been  thereby  inspired  to  his  description.  But  he 
was  too  ill  for  such  outings,  and  moreover  the  earlier 
of  the  two  stanzas  comes  well  back  in  the  poem  (sixty- 
fourth  out  of  eighty-eight)  and  it  is  impossible  to  suppose 
that  in  his  then  state  he  could  have  added  so  much  to 
the  fragment  as  that  would  imply.  So  we  must  credit  the 
stanzas  to  imagination  only,  and  take  it  as  certain  that 
his  only  real  occupation  with  poetry  in  these  days  was 
in  passing  through  the  press  the  new  volume  of  poems 
{Lamia,  Isabella,  etc.,)  which  his  friends  had  at  last 
persuaded  him  to  put  forward.  Even  on  this  task  his 
hold  must  have  been  loose,  seeing  that  the  publishers 
put  in  without  his  knowledge  a  note  which  he  afterwards 
sharply  disowned,  to  the  effect  that  his  reason  for  drop- 
ping Hyperion  had  been  the  ill  reception  of  Endymion 
by  the  critics. 

His  only  outing,  so  far  as  we  hear,  was  to  an  exhibition 


464  KINDNESS  OF  LEIGH  HUNT 

of  English  historical  portraits  at  the  British  Institution, 
of  which  he  writes  to  Brown  with  some  interest  and 
vividness.  He  tells  at  the  same  time  of  an  invitation, 
which  he  was  not  well  enough  to  accept,  to  meet  Words- 
worth, Southey,  Lamb,  Haydon,  and  some  others  at 
supper.  Leigh  Hunt,  despite  his  engrossing  Kterary 
and  editorial  occupations  and  a  recent  trying  illness  of 
his  own,  did  his  best,  while  Keats  was  his  inmate,  to 
keep  him  interested  and  amused.  Keats  in  writing  to 
his  sister  gratefully  acknowledges  as  much.  'Mr  Hunt 
does  everything  in  his  power  to  make  the  time  pass  as 
agreeably  with  me  as  possible.  I  read  the  greatest 
part  of  the  day  and  generally  take  two  half-hour  walks 
a  day  up  and  down  the  terrace  which  is  very  much 
pestered  with  cries,  ballad  singers,  and  street  music' 
But  the  obsession  of  his  passion,  its  consuming  jealousy 
and  hopelessness,  gave  him  little  respite.  He  would 
keep  his  eyes  fixed  all  day,  as  he  afterwards  avowed, 
on  Hampstead;  and  once  again,  at  Hunt's  suggestion, 
they  took  a  drive  as  far  as  the  Heath,  he  burst  into  a 
flood  of  unwonted  tears  and  declared  his  heart  was 
breaking. 

His  letters  to  his  beloved  in  these  same  months  are 
too  agonizing  to  read.  He  is  so  little  himself  in  them, 
so  merely  and  utterly,  to  borrow  words  of  his  own,  'a 
fever  of  himself,'  that  many  of  us  could  not  endure, 
when  they  were  first  published,  the  thought  of  this 
Keats-that-is-no-Keats  being  exposed  before  a  hastily 
reading  and  carelessly  judging  after-world,  and  even 
now  cannot  but  regret  it.  All  the  morbid  self-torturing 
elements  of  his  nature,  which  in  health  it  had  been  a 
main  part  of  the  battle  of  his  life  to  subdue,  and  of 
which  he  never  suffered  those  about  him  to  see  a  sign, 
now  burst  from  control  and  flamed  out  against  the  girl 
he  loved  and  the  friends  he  loved  next  best  to  her.  Once 
only,  at  the  beginning  of  the  time,  he  could  write  con- 
tentedly, telling  her  that  he  is  marking  for  her  the  most 
beautiful  passages  in  Spenser,  'comforting  myself  in  being 
somewhat  occupied  to  give  you  however  small  a  pleasure. 


MISERY  AND  JEALOUSY  465 

It  has  lightened  my  time  very  much.  God  bless  you/ 
His  other  letters  are  in  a  tortured,  almost  frenzied, 
strain  of  jealous  suspicion  and  reproach  against  her  and 
against  those  of  his  intimates  who  had,  as  he  imagined, 
disapproved  their  attachment,  or  pried  into  or  made 
light  of  it,  or  else  had  shown  her  too  marked  attentions. 
Among  the  former  were- Reynolds  and  his  sisters,  from 
whom  for  the  time  being  he  was  tacitly  estranged. 
Among  the  latter  he  includes  Brown  and  Dilke,  with 
especial  bitterness  against  Brown.  Between  them  all 
they  had  made,  he  vows,  a  football  of  his  heart,  and 
again,  'Hamlet's  heart  was  full  of  such  misery  as  mine 
is  when  he  cried  to  OpheHa,  "Go  to  a  Nunnery,  go, 
go!"'  That  these  were  but  the  half -delirious  prompt- 
ings of  his  fevered  blood  is  clear  from  the  fact  that  a 
very  few  weeks  both  before  and  after  such  outbreaks 
he  wrote  to  Brown  as  though  counting  him  as  much 
a  friend  as  ever.  As  for  his  betrothed,  wound  as  his 
reproaches  might  at  the  time,  we  know  from  her  own 
words  that  they  left  no  lasting  impression  of  unkindness 
on  her  memory.  Writing  in  riper  years  to  Medwin,  who 
had  asked  her  whether  the  accounts  current  in  Rome 
of  Keats's  violence  of  nature  were  true,  she  says: — 

That  his  sensibility  was  most  acute,  is  true,  and  his  passions 
were  very  strong,  but  not  violent,  if  by  that  term,  violence  of 
temper  is  implied.  His  was  no  doubt  susceptible,  but  his  anger 
seemed  rather  to  turn  on  himself  than  on  others,  and  in  moments 
of  greatest  irritation,  it  was  only  by  a  sort  of  savage  despondency 
that  he  sometimes  grieved  and  wounded  his  friends.  Violence 
such  as  the  letter  describes,  was  quite  foreign  to  his  nature.  For 
more  than  a  twelvemonth  before  quitting  England,  I  saw  him 
every  day,  often  witnessed  his  sufferings,  both  mental  and  bodily, 
and  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say,  that  he  never  could  have  addressed 
an  unkind  expression,  much  less  a  violent  one,  to  any  human 
being.i 

1  Medwin's  carelessness  of  statement  and  workmanship  are  well  known: 
he  is  perfectly  casual  in  the  use  of  quotation  marks  and  the  like,  and  in 
the  original  edition  of  his  untrustworthy  Life  of  SfieUey  it  was  difficult  to 
be  sure  that  these  words  were  quoted  as  textually  Mrs  Lindon's  own. 
But  in  re-editing  the  book  from  its  author's  revised  and  expanded  copy, 
Mr  Buxton  Forman  has  left  no  doubt  on  the  matter. 


466  SEVERN  AND  MRS  GISBORNE 

These  words  of  Fanny  Brawne,  then  Mrs  Lindon,  to 
Medwin  are  not  well  known,  and  it  is  only  fair  to  quote 
them  as  proving  that  if  in  youth  the  lady  had  not  been 
willing  to  sacrifice  her  gaieties  and  her  pleasure  in 
admiration  for  the  sake  of  her  lover's  peace  of  mind, 
she  showed  at  any  rate  in  after  life  a  true  and  lo^^al 
understanding  of  his  character. 

While  Keats  was  staying  in  Kentish  Town  Severn 
went  often  to  see  him,  and  in  the  second  week  of  Julj^ 
writes  to  Haslam  struggling  to  keep  up  his  hopes  for 
their  friend  in  spite  of  appearances  and  of  Keats's  own 
conviction: — 'It  will  give  you  pleasure  to  say  I  trust 
he  will  still  recover.  His  appearance  is  shocking  and 
now  reminds  me  of  poor  Tom  and  I  have  been  inclined 
to  think  him  in  the  same  way.  For  himself — ^he  makes 
sure  of  it — and  seems  prepossessed  that  he  cannot 
recover — now  I  seem  more  than  ever  not  to  think  so 
and  I  know  you  will  agree  with  me  when  you  see  him — 
are  you  aware  another  volume  of  Poems  was  published 
last  week — ^in  which  is  "Lovely  Isabel — ^poor  simple 
Isabel' '?  I  have  been  delighted  with  this  volume  and 
think  it  will  even  please  the  million.'  During  the  same 
period  Shelley's  friends  the  Gisbomes  twice  met  him 
at  Leigh  Hunt's.  The  first  time  was  on  June  23.  Mrs 
Gisborne  writes  in  her  journal  that  having  lately  been 
ill  he  spoke  little  and  in  a  low  tone:  'the  Endymion 
was  not  mentioned,  this  person  might  not  be  its  author; 
but  on  observing  his  countenance  and  eyes  I  persuaded 
myself  that  he  was  the  very  person.'  It  is  always 
Keats's  eyes  that  strangers  thus  notice  first:  the  late 
Mrs  Procter,  who  met  him  only  once,  at  a  lecture  of 
Hazlitt's,  remembered  them  to  the  end  of  her  long  life 
as  like  those  of  one  'who  had  been  looking  at  some 
glorious  sight.'  This  first  time  Keats  and  Mrs  Gisborne 
had  some  talk  about  music  and  singing,  but  some  three 
weeks  later,  on  July  12th,  the  same  lady  notes,  'drank 
tea  at  Mr  Hunt's;  I  was  much  pained  by  the  sight 
of  poor  Keats,  under  sentence  of  death  from  Dr  Lamb. 
He  never  spoke  and  looks  emaciated.' 


INVITATION  FROM  SHELLEY  467 

Doubtless  it  was  under  the  impression  of  this  last 
meeting  that  Mr  Gisbome  sent  Shelley  the  account  of 
Keats's  state  of  health  which  moved  Shelley  to  write 
in  his  own  and  his  wife's  name  urgiag  that  Keats  should 
come  to  Italy  to  avoid  the  English  winter  and  take  up 
his  quarters  with  or  near  them  at  Pisa.  Shelley  repeats 
nearly  the  same  kind  and  just  opinion  of  Endymion  as 
he  had  previously  expressed  in  writing  to  the  OUiers; 
saying  he  has  lately  read  it  again,  'and  ever  with  a  new 
sense  of  the  treasiu-es  of  poetry  it  contains,  though 
treasures  poured  forth  with  indistinct  profusion.  This 
people  in  general  will  not  endure,  and  that  is  the  cause 
of  the  comparatively  few  copies  which  have  been  sold. 
I  feel  persuaded  that  you  are  capable  of  the  greatest 
things,  so  you  but  will.'  At  the  same  time  Shelley 
sends  Keats  a  copy  of  his  Cend.  Keats's  answer  shows 
him  touched  and  grateful  for  the  kindness  offered,  but 
nevertheless,  as  always  where  Shelley  is  in  question,  in 
some  degree  embarrassed  and  ungracious.  He  says 
nothing  of  the  invitation  to  Pisa,  though  he  was  already 
considering  the  possibility  of  going  to  winter  in  Italy. 
As  to  Endymion,  he  says  he  would  willingly  imwrite  it 
did  he  care  so  much  as  once  about  reputation,  and  as 
to  The  Cend,  and  The  Prometheus  announced  as  forth- 
coming, he  makes  the  well-known,  rather  obscurely 
worded  criticism  of  which  the  main  drift  is  that  to  his 
mind  Shelley  pours  out  new  poems  too  quickly  and 
does  not  concentrate  enough  upon  the  purely  artistic 
aims  and  quaHties  of  his  work.  These,  Keats  goes  on, 
are  'by  many  spirits  nowadays  considered  the  Mammon. 
A  modem  work,  it  is  said,  must  have  a  purpose  which 
may  be  the  God.  An  artist  must  serve  Mammon;  he 
must  have  'self-concentration' — selfishness,  perhaps. 
You,  I  am  sure,  will  forgive  me  for  sincerely  remarking 
that  you  might  curb  your  magnanimity  and  be  more 
of  an  artist,  and  load  every  rift  of  your  subject  with 
ore.' 

Keats  in  these  admonitions  was  no  doubt  remem- 
bering  views   of   Shelley's   such   as   are   expressed   in 


468  KEATS  ON   THE  CENCI 

his  words  'I  consider  poetry  very  subordinate  to  moral 
and  political  science.'  Judging  by  them,  his  mind 
would  seem  to  have  veered  back  from  the  convictions 
which  inspired  the  pre-amble  to  the  revised  Hyperion 
the  autumn  before,  insisting,  in  language  which  might 
almost  seem  borrowed  from  the  preface  to  AlastoVj  on 
the  doom  that  awaits  poets  who  play  their  art  in  selfish- 
ness instead  of  making  it  their  paramount  aim  to  'pour 
balm'  upon  the  miseries  of  mankind.  With  reference 
to  the  promised  Prometheus  he  adds,  'could  I  have  my 
own  wish  effected,  you  would  have  it  still  in  manu- 
script, or  be  but  now  putting  an  end  to  the  second 
act.  I  remember  your  advising  me  not  to  publish  my 
first  blights,  on  Hampstead  Heath.  I  am  returning 
advice  upon  your  hands.'  Finally,  mentioning  that  he 
is  sending  out  a  copy  of  his  lately  published  Lamia 
volume,  he  says  that  most  of  its  contents  have  been 
written  above  two  years  (a  slip  of  memory,  the  state- 
ment being  only  true  of  Isabella  and  of  one  or  two 
minor  pieces)  and  would  never  have  been  published 
now  but  for  hope  of  gain. 

Shelley's  letter  was  written  from  Pisa  on  the  27th  of 
July  and  received  by  Keats  on  the  13th  of  August. 
On  the  previous  day  he  had  fled  suddenly  from  under 
the  Leigh  Hunts'  roof,  having  been  thrown  into  a  fit  of 
uncontrollable  nervous  agitation  by  the  act  of  a  dis- 
charged servant,  who  kept  back  a  letter  to  him  from 
Fanny  Brawne  and  on  quitting  the  house  left  it  to  be 
delivered,  opened  and  two  days  late,  by  one  of  the 
children.  His  first  impulse  on  leaving  the  Hunts'  was 
to  go  back  to  his  old  lodging  with  Bentley  the  postman, 
but  this  Mrs  Brawne  would  not  hear  of,  and  took  him 
into  her  own  house,  where  she  and  her  daughter  for  the 
next  few  weeks  nursed  him  and  did  all  they  could  for 
his  comfort. 

During  those  unhappy  months  at  Kentish  Town 
Keats's  best  work  was  given  to  the  world.  First,  in 
Leigh  Hunt's  Indicator  for  May  20,  La  Belle  Dame  sans 
Merdj  signed,  obviously  in  bitterness^  'Caviare'  (Ham- 


LA  BELLE  DAME  PUBLISHED  469 

let's  'caviare  to  the  general'),  and  unluckily  enfeebled 
by  changes  for  which  we  find  no  warrant  either  in 
Keats' s  autograph  or  in  extant  copies  made  by  his 
friends  Woodhouse  and  Brown.  Keats's  judgment  in 
revising  his  own  work  had  evidently  by  this  time  become 
unsure.  We  have  seen  how  in  recasting  Hyperion  the 
previous  autumn  he  changed  some  of  the  finest  of  his 
original  lines  for  the  worse:  and  it  is  conceivable  that 
in  the  case  of  La  Belle  Dame  he  may  have  done  so  again 
of  his  own  motion,  but  much  more  likely,  I  should  say, 
that  the  changes,  which  are  all  in  the  direction  of  the 
sHpshod  and  the  commonplace,  were  made  on  Hunt's 
suggestion  and  that  Keats  acquiesced  from  fatigue  or 
indifference,  or  perhaps  even  from  that  very  sense  of 
lack  of  sympathy  in  most  readers  which  made  him 
sign  'Caviare.'  Hunt  introduced  the  piece  with  some 
commendatory  words,  showing  that  he  at  all  events 
felt  nothing  amiss  with  it  in  its  new  shape,  and  added 
a  short  account  of  the  old  French  poem  by  Alain 
Chartier  from  which  the  title  was  taken.  It  is  to  be 
deplored  that  in  some  recent  and  what  should  be 
standard  editions  of  Keats  the  poem  stands  as  thus 
printed  in  the  Indicator,  instead  of  in  the  original 
form  rightly  given  by  Lord  Houghton  from  Brown's 
transcript,  in  which  it  had  become  a  classic  of  the 
language.^ 

It  is  surely  a  perversion  in  textual  criticism  to  per- 
petuate the  worse  version  merely  because  it  happens 
to  be  the  one  printed  in  Keats's  lifetime.  No  sensitive 
reader  but  must  feel  that  'wretched  wight'  is  a  vague 
and  vapid  substitute  for  the  clear  image  of  the  'night- 
at-arms,'  while  'sigh'd  full  sore'  is  ill  replaced  by 
'sighed  deep,'  and  'wild  wild  eyes'  still  worse  by  'wild 
sad  eyes':  that  the  whimsical  particularity  of  the 
'kisses  four,'  removed  in  the  new  version,  gives  the 


1 1  allude  to  the  various  editions  issued  in  recent  years  by  the 
Delegates  of  the  Oxford  University  Press,  to  whom  I  would  hereby 
appeal  to  let  the  piece  be  cancelled  on  the  plates  and  the  earUer  text 
re-estabUshed. 


470  A  DISFIGURED  VERSION 

poem  an  essential  part  of  its  savour  (Keats  was  fond 
of  these  fanciful  numberings,  compare  the  damsels  who 
stand  ^by  fives  and  sevens'  in  the  Induction  to  Calidore, 
and  the  'four  laurelled  spirits'  in  the  Epistle  to  George 
Felton  Matthew):  and  again,  that  the  loose  broken 
construction — 'So  kissed  to  sleep'  is  quite  uncharacter- 
istic of  the  poet:  and  yet  again,  that  the  phrase  'And 
there  we  slumbered  on  the  moss/  is  what  any  amateur 
rimester  might  write  about  any  pair  of  afternoon  pick- 
nickers,  while  the  phrase  which  was  cancelled  for  it, 
'And  there  she  lulled  me  asleep,'  falls  with  exactly  the 
mystic  cadence  and  hushing  weight  upon  the  spirit 
which  was  required.  The  reader  may  be  interested  to 
hear  the  effect  which  these  changes  had  upon  the  late 
William  Morris,  than  whom  no  man  had  a  better  right 
to  speak.    Mr  Sydney  Cockerell  writes  me : — 

In  February  1894  the  last  sheets  of  the  Kelmscott  Press 
Keats,  edited  by  F.  S.  Ellis,  were  being  printed.  A  specimen 
of  each  sheet  of  every  book  was  brought  in  to  Morris  as  soon  as 
it  came  off  the  press.  I  was  with  him  when  he  happened  to  open 
the  sheet  on  which  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci  was  printed.  He 
began  to  read  it  and  was  suddenly  aware  of  unfamiliar  words, 
'wretched  wight'  for  *  knight  at  arms,'  verses  4  and  5  trans- 
posed, and  several  changes  in  verse  7.  Great  was  his  indignation. 
He  swiftly  altered  the  words  and  then  read  the  poem  to  me, 
remarking  that  it  was  the  germ  from  which  all  the  poetry  of  his 
group  had  sprung — ^The  sheet  was  reprinted  and  the  earlier  and 
better  version  restored — I  still  have  the  cancelled  sheet  with  his 
corrections. 

Six  weeks  later,  in  the  first  days  of  July,  appeared 
the  volume.  Lamia,  Lsahella,  and  other  Poems  in  right 
of  which  Keats's  name  is  immortal.  La  Belle  Dame  was 
not  in  it,  nor  In  drear-nighted  December,  nor  any 
sonnets,  nor  any  of  the  verses  composed  on  the  Scotch 
tour,  nor  the  fragment  of  The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  nor, 
happily.  The  Cap  and  Bells:  but  it  included  all  the  odes 
except  that  on  Indolence  and  the  fragment  To  Maia, 
as  well  as  nearly  all  the  other  minor  pieces  of  any  account 
written  since  Endymion,  such  as  Fancy,  the  Mermaid 
Tavern  and  Rohin  Hood  lines,  with  the  three  finished 


THE  LAMIA  VOLUME  PUBLISHED      471 

Tales,  Isabella,  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  and  Lamia,  and 
the  great  fragment  of  Hyperion  in  its  original,  not  its 
recast,  form.  Keats  was  too  far  gone  in  illness  and  the 
hopelessness  of  passion  to  be  much  moved  by  the  success 
or  failure  of  his  new  venture.  But  the  story  of  its 
first  reception  is  part  of  his  biography,  and  shall  be 
briefly  told  in  this  place. 

The  first  critic  in  the  field  was  the  best:  no  less  a 
master  than  Charles  Lamb,  who  within  a  fortnight  of 
the  appearance  of  the  volume  contributed  to  the  New 
Times  a  brief  notice,  anonymous  but  marked  with  all 
the  charm  and  authority  of  his  genius.^  He  begins  by 
quoting  the  four  famous  stanzas  picturing  Madeline  at 
her  prayers  in  the  moonlit  chamber,  and  comments — 
^  Like  the  radiance,  which  comes  from  those  old  windows 
upon  the  limbs  and  garments  of  the  damsel,  is  the 
almost  Chaucer-like  painting,  with  which  this  poet 
illumes  every  subject  he  touches.  We  have  scarcely 
anything  like  it  in  modern  description.  It  brings  us 
back  to  ancient  days  and  ^^  Beauty  making-beautiful 
old  rhymes."'  ^The  finest  thing,'  Lamb  continues, 
'in  the  volume  is  The  Pot  of  BasiU  Noting  how  the 
anticipation  of  the  assassination  is  wonderfully  con- 
ceived in  the  one  epithet  of  Hhe  murdered  man,'  he  goes 
on  to  quote  the  stanzas  telling  the  discovery  of  and 
digging  for  the  corpse,  Hhan  which,'  he  says,  Hhere 
is  nothing  more  awfully  simple  in  diction,  more  nakedly 
grand  and  moving  in  sentiment,  in  Dante,  in  Chaucer 
or  in  Spenser.'  It  is  to  be  noted  that  Lamb,  who  loved 
things  Gothic  better  than  things  Grecian,  ignores  Hy~ 
perion,  which  most  critics  in  praising  the  volume 
pitched  on  to  the  neglect  of  the  rest,  and  proceeds  to 
tell  of  Lamia,  winding  up  with  a  return  to  The  Pot 
of  Basil : — 

More  exuberantly  rich  in  imagery  and  painting  is  the 
story    of    the    Lamia.      It    is    of    as    gorgeous    stuff    as    ever 

1  The  recognition  of  this  review  and  its  inclusion  in  the  canon  of  Lamb's 
works  is  one  of  the  many  services  for  which  thanks  are  due  to  his  never- 
enough-to-be-praised  editor,  Mr  E.  V.  Lucas  (The  Works  of  Charles  and 
Mary  Lamb,  Vol.  I,  pp.  200,  470). 


472       CHARLES  LAMB^S  APPRECIATION 

romance  was  composed  of.  Her  first  appearance  in  serpentine 
form — 

— A  beauteous  wreath  with  melancholy  eyes — 

her  dialogue  with  Hermes,  the  Star  of  Lethe,  as  he  is  called  by 
one  of  these  prodigal  phrases  which  Mr  Keats  abounds  in,  which 
are  each  a  poem  in  a  word,  and  which  in  this  instance  lays  open 
to  us  at  once,  like  a  picture,  all  the  dim  regions  and  their  inhabi- 
tants, and  the  sudden  coming  of  a  celestial  among  them;  the 
charming  of  her  into  woman's  shape  again  by  the  God;  her 
marriage  with  the  beautiful  Lycius;  her  magic  palace,  which 
those  who  knew  the  street,  and  remembered  it  complete  from 
childhood,  never  remembered  to  have  seen  before;  the  few 
Persian  mutes,  her  attendants, 

— ^who  that  same  year 
Were  seen  about  the  markets :  none  knew  where 
They  could  inhabit; — 

the  high-wrought  splendours  of  the  nuptial  bower,  with  the 
fading  of  the  whole  pageantry.  Lamia,  and  all,  away,  before  the 
glance  of  ApoUonius, — are  all  that  fairy  land  can  do  for  us.  They 
are  for  younger  impressibilities.  To  us  an  ounce  of  feeling  is 
worth  a  pound  of  fancy;  and  therefore  we  recur  again,  with  a 
warmer  gratitude,  to  the  story  of  Isabella  and  the  pot  of  basil, 
and  those  never-cloying  stanzas  which  we  have  cited,  and  which 
we  think  should  disarm  criticism,  if  it  be  not  in  its  nature  cruel; 
if  it  would  not  deny  to  honey  its  sweetness,  nor  to  roses  redness, 
nor  light  to  the  stars  in  Heaven;  if  it  would  not  bay  the  moon 
out  of  the  skies,  rather  than  acknowledge  she  is  fair. 

Leigh  Hxint,  who  during  all  this  time  was  in  all  ways 
loyally  doing  his  best  for  Keats's  encouragement  and 
comfort,  and  had  just  dedicated  his  translation  of  Tasso's 
Aminta  to  him  as  to  one  *  equally  pestered  by  the 
critical  and  admired  by  the  poetical/ — Leigh  Hunt 
within  a  month  of  the  appearance  of  the  volume  reviewed 
and  quoted  from  it  with  full  appreciation  in  two  numbers 
of  the  Indicator.  His  notice  contained  those  judicious 
remarks  which  we  have  already  cited  on  the  philo- 
sophical weakness  of  Lamia,  praising  at  the  same  time 
the  gorgeousness  of  the  snake  description,  and  saying, 
of  the  lines  on  the  music  being  the  sole  support  of  the 
magical  palace-roof,  Hhis  is  the  very  quintessence  of 
the  romantic/    'When  Mr  Keats  errs  in  his  poetry,' 


THE  NEW  MONTHLY  473 

says  Hunt  in  regard  to  the  Pot  of  Basil,  *it  is  from  the 
ill-management  of  a  good  thing — exuberance  of  ideas'; 
and,  comparing  the  contents  of  this  volimie  with  his 
earlier  work,  concludes  as  follows: — 

The  author's  versification  is  now  perfected,  the  exuberances 
of  his  imagination  restrained,  and  a  calm  power,  the  surest  and 
loftiest  of  all  power,  takes  place  of  the  impatient  workings  of  the 
younger  god  within  him.  The  character  of  his  genius  is  that  of 
energy  and  voluptuousness,  each  able  at  will  to  take  leave  of 
the  other,  and  possessing,  in  their  union,  a  high  feeling  of  humanity 
not  common  to  the  best  authors  who  can  less  combine  them. 
Mr  Keats  undoubtedly  takes  his  seat  with  the  oldest  and  best 
of  our  living  poets. 

But  Leigh  Hunt's  praise  of  one  of  his  own  supposed 
disciples  of  the  Cockney  School  would  carry  little  weight 
outside  the  circle  of  special  sympathizers.  A  better 
index  to  the  way  the  wind  was  beginning  to  blow  was 
the  treatment  of  the  volume  in  Colburn's  New  Monthly 
Magazine,  of  which  the  poet  Thomas  Campbell  had 
lately  been  appointed  editor,  with  the  excellent  Cyrus 
Redding  as  acting  editor  under  him: — ^ These  poems 
are  very  far  superior,'  declares  the  critic,  Ho  any 
which  the  author  has  previously  committed  to  the 
press.  They  have  nothing  showy,  or  extravagant, 
or  eccentric  about  them;  but  are  pieces  of  calm 
beauty,  or  of  lone  and  self-supported  grandeur.'  In 
Lamia,  Hhere  is  a  mingling  of  Greek  majesty  with 
fairy  luxuriance  which  we  have  not  elsewhere  seen.' 
Isabella  is  compared  with  Barry  Cornwall's  Sicilian 
Story:  'the  poem  of  Mr  Keats  has  not  the  luxury  of 
description,  nor  the  rich  love-scenes,  of  Mr  Cornwall; 
but  he  tells  the  tale  with  a  naked  and  affecting  simplicity 
which  goes  irresistibly  to  the  heart.'  The  Eve  of  St 
Agnes  is  'a  piece  of  consecrated  fancy,'  in  which  'a 
soft  religious  light  is  shed  over  the  whole  story.'  In 
Hyperion  Hhe  picture  of  the  vast  abode  of  Cybele  and 
the  Titans  is  'in  the  sublimest  style  of  ^schylus': 
and  in  conclusion  the  critic  takes  leave  of  Mr  Keats 
'with  wonder  at  the  gigantic  stride  which  he  has  taken, 


474         OTHER  FAVOURABLE  REVIEWS 

and  with  the  good  hope  that  if  he  proceeds  in  the  high 
and  pure  style  which  he  has  now  chosen,  he  will  attain 
an  exalted  and  a  lasting  station  among  English  poets/ 
Of  the  other  chief  literary  reviews  in  England,  the  old- 
established  Monthly  begins  in  a  strain  scarcely  less 
laudatory,  but  wavers  and  becomes  admonitory  before 
the  end,  while  Keats's  dismal  monitor  of  three  years 
before,  the  sententious  Eclectic  Review,  acknowledging 
in  him  'a  yoimg  man  possessed  of  an  elegant  fancy,  a 
warm  and  lively  imagination,  and  something  above  the 
average  talents  of  persons  who  take  to  writing  poetry,' 
proceeds  to  warn  him  against  regarding  imagination  as 
the  proper  organ  of  poetry,  to  lecture  him  on  his  choice 
of  subjects,  his  addiction  to  the  Greek  mythology,  and 
to  poetry  for  poetry's  sake  (^poetry,  after  all,  if  pursued 
as  an  end,  is  but  child's  play').  The  British  Critic, 
more  contemptuous  even  than  Blackwood  or  the  Quar- 
terly in  its  handling  of  Endymion,  this  time  prints  a 
kind  of  palinode,  admitting  that  ^Mr  Keats  is  a  person 
of  no  ordinary  genius,'  and  prophes3dng  that  if  he  will 
take  Spenser  and  Milton  for  models  instead  of  Leigh 
Hunt  he  'need  not  despair  of  attaining  to  a  very  high 
and  enviable  place  in  the  public  esteem.' 

Writing  to  Brown  from  Hampstead  in  the  latter  half 
of  August,  Keats  seems  aware  that  the  critics  are  being 
kinder  to  him  than  before.  'My  book,'  he  says,  'has 
had  good  success  among  the  literary  people,  and  I 
beheve  has  a  moderate  sale';  and  again,  'the  sale  of 
my  book  has  been  very  slow,  but  it  has  been  very  highly 
rated.'  The  great  guns  of  Scottish  criticism  had  not 
yet  spoken.  Constable's  Edinburgh  (formerly  the  Scots) 
Magazine,  which  never  either  hit  or  bit  hard,  and  whose 
managers  had  preferred  the  ways  of  prudence  when 
Bailey  urged  them  two  years  before  boldly  to  denounce 
the  outrages  of  the  'Z'  gang  in  Blackwood,  in  due 
course  praised  Keats's  new  volume,  but  cautiously, 
saying  that  'it  must  and  ought  to  attract  attention, 
for  it  displays  the  ore  of  true  poetic  genius,  though 
mingled  with  a  large  portion  of  dross.  ...  He  is  con- 


TAYLOR  AND  BLACKWOOD  475 

tinually  shocking  our  ideas  of  poetical  decorum,  at  the 
very  time  when  we  are  acknowledging  the  hand  of 
genius.  In  thus  boldly  running  counter  to  old  opinions, 
however,  we  cannot  conceive  that  Mr  Keats  merits 
bitter  contempt  or  ridicule;  the  weapons  which  are  too 
frequently  employed  when  liberal  discussion  and  argu- 
ment would  be  unsuccessful/  As  to  Blackwood's 
Magazine  itself,  we  are  fortunate  in  having  an  amusing 
first-hand  narrative  of  an  encounter  of  its  owner  and 
manager  with  Keats's  publisher  which  preceded  the 
appearance  of  Keats's  new  volume.  The  excellent  Taylor, 
staunch  to  his  injured  young  friend  and  client  even  at 
some  risk,  as  in  his  last  words  he  shows  himself  aware, 
to  his  own  interests,  writes  from  Fleet  Street  on  the 
last  day  of  August  to  his  partner  Hessey: — 

I  have  had  this  day  a  call  from  Mr  Blackwood.  We  shook 
hands  and  went  into  the  Back  Shop.  After  asking  him  what  was 
new  at  Edinburgh,  and  talking  about  Clare,  the  Magazine, 
Baldwin,  Peter  Corcoran  and  a  few  other  subjects,^  I  observed 
that  we  had  published  another  Volume  of  Keats's  Poems  on 
which  his  Editors  would  have  another  opportunity  of  being 
witty  at  his  expense.  He  said  they  were  disposed  to  speak 
favourably  of  Mr  K.  this  time — and  he  expected  that  the  article 
would  have  appeared  in  this  month's  mag. 

*But  can  they  be  so  inconsistent?'  *  There  is  no  inconsistency 
in  praising  him  if  they  think  he  deserves  it.'  *  After  what  has 
been  said  of  his  talents  I  should  think  it  very  inconsistent.' 
'Certainly  they  found  fault  with  his  former  Poems  but  that  was 
because  they  thought  they  deserved  it.'  *But  why  did  they 
attack  him  personally?'     'They  did  not  do  so.' 

'  No  ?  Did  not  they  speak  of  him  in  ridicule  as  Johnny  Keats, 
describe  his  appearance  while  addressing  a  Sonnet  to  Ailsa  Crag, 
and  compare  him  as  a  (?)  hen  to  Shelley  as  a  Bird  of  Paradise, 
besides,  what  can  you  say  to  that  cold  blooded  passage  when  they 

1  Clare  is  John  Clare,  the  distressed  peasant  poet,  in  whom  many  kindly 
people  fancied  they  had  discovered  an  English  Burns,  and  on  whose 
behalf,  at  the  same  time  as  on  Keats's,  Taylor  was  exerting  himseK  to  raise 
a  fund.  'Peter  Corcoran'  refers  to  a  brilliant  medley  called  The  Fancy 
lately  published  anonymously  by  John  Hamilton  Reynolds,  and  purporting 
to  tell  the  fortunes  and  sample  the  poetical  remains  of  an  ill-starred  youth 
so-named,  lured  away  from  fair  prospects  in  love  and  literature  by  a  passion 
for  the  prize  ring.  The  gaps  and  queries  in  this  letter,  the  MS.  of  which  is 
in  America,  indicate  places  which  its  friendly  transcriber  found  illegible. 


476  A  SKIRMISH 

say  they  will  take  care  he  shall  never  get  £50  again  for  a  vol.  of 
his  Poems — what  had  he  done  to  deserve  such  attacks  as  these?' 

*0h,  it  was  all  a  joke,  the  writer  meant  nothing  more  than  to 
be  witty.  He  certainly  thought  there  was  much  affectation  in 
his  Poetry,  and  he  expressed  his  opinion  only — It  was  dcme  in 
the  fair  spirit  of  criticism.' 

'It  was  done  in  the  Spirit  of  the  Devil,  Mr  Blackwood.  So  if 
a  young  man  is  guilty  of  affectation  while  he  is  walking  the  streets 
it  is  fair  in  another  Person  because  he  dislikes  it  to  come  and 
knock  him  down. ' 

'No,'  says  B.,  'but  a  poet  challenges  public  opinion  by  printing 
his  book,  but  I  suppose  you  would  have  them  not  criticized  at 
all?' 

*I  certainly  think  they  are  punished  enough  by  neglect  and 
by  the  failure  of  their  hopes  and  to  me  it  seems  very  cruel  to 
abuse  a  man  merely  because  he  cannot  give  us  as  much  pleasure 
as  he  wishes.  But  you  go  even  beyond  his  .  .  .  (?)  you  strike  a 
man  when  he  is  down.  He  gets  a  violent  blow  from  the  Quar- 
terly— and  then  you  begm.' 

*I  beg  your  pardon,'  says  B.,  'we  were  the  jBrst.' 

'I  think  not,  but  if  you  were  the  first,  you  continued  it  after, 
for  that  truly  diabolical  thrust  about  the  £50  appeared  after 
the  critique  in  the  Quarterly.' 

'You  mistake  that  altogether,'  said  B.,  'the  writer  does  not 
like  the  Cockney  School,  so  he  went  on  joking  Mr  K.  about  it.' 

'Why  should  not  the  manners  of  gentlemen  continue  to 
regulate  their  conduct  when  they  are  writing  of  each  other  as 
much  as  when  they  are  in  conversation?  No  man  would  insult 
Mr  Keats  in  this  manner  in  his  company,  and  what  is  the  difference 
between  writing  and  speaking  of  a  person  except  that  the  written 
attack  is  the  more  base  from  being  made  anonymously  and 
therefore  at  no  personal  risk. — I  feel  regard  for  Mr  Keats  as  a  man 
of  real  Genius,  a  Gentleman,  nay  more,  one  of  the  gentlest  of 
Human  Beings.  He  does  not  resent  these  things  himself,  he 
merely  says  of  his  Opponents  "They  don't  know  me."  Now  this 
mildness  ( ?)  his  friends  feel  the  more  severely  when  they  see  him 
ill  used.  But  this  feeling  is  not  confined  to  them.  I  am  happy 
to  say  that  the  Public  Interest  is  awakened  to  the  sense  of  the 
Injustice  which  has  been  done  him  and  the  attempts  to  ruin  him 
will  have  in  the  end  a  contrary  effect.'  Here  I  turned  the  con- 
versation to  another  subject  by  asking  B.  if  he  read  the  Abbot, 
and  in  about  10  minutes  more  he  made  his  Exit  with  a  formal 
Bow  and  a  Good  Morning. 

The  above  is  the  Substance  and  as  clearly  as  possible  the 
words,  I  made  use  of.     His  replies  were  a  little  more  copious 


IMPENITENCE  477 

than  I  have  stated  but  to  the  same  effect.  I  have  written  this 
conversation  down  on  the  day  it  took  place  because  I  suspect 
some  allusion  may  hereafter  be  made  to  it  in  the  Mag.  and  I 
fully  expect  that  whatever  Books  we  publish  will  be  received 
with  reference  to  the  feeling  it  is  calculated  to  excite  in  the 
bosoms  of  these  freebooting  .  .  .  .^ 

In  the  upshot,  the  Blackwood  critics  took  no  direct 
notice  of  the  Lamia  volume  at  aU,  but  made  occasion 
during  the  autumn  to  say  their  new  say  about  Keats 
in  a  review  of  Shelley's  Prometheus  Unbound.  This  time 
the  hand  is  unmistakably  that  of  Wilson.  For  the  last 
year  or  more  Wilson,  foUowing  a  hint  given  him  by  De 
Quincey,  had  chosen  to  take  Shelley  boisterously  under 
his  patronage  as  a  poet  of  true  genius,  for  whom  scarcely 
any  praise  would  be  too  high  could  he  only  be  weaned 
from  his  impious  opinions.  Now,  after  rebutting  a 
current  and  really  gratuitous  charge  that  the  magazine 
praised  Shelley  from  the  knowledge  that  he  was  a  man 
of  means  and  family,  and  denounced  Hunt  and  Keats 
because  they  were  poor  and  struggling,  the  critic  blusters 
characteristically  on,  in  a  strain  half  apologetic  in  one 
breath  and  in  the  next  as  odiously  insolent  as  ever: — 

As  for  Mr  Keats,  we  are  informed  that  he  is  in  a  very  bad 
state  of  health,  and  that  his  friends  attribute  a  great  deal  of  it 
to  the  pain  he  has  suffered  from  the  critical  castigation  his 
Endymion  drew  down  on  him  in  this  magazine.  If  it  be  so,  we 
are  most  heartily  sorry  for  it,  and  have  no  hesitation  in  saying, 
that  had  we  suspected  that  young  author,  of  being  so  delicately 
nerved,  we  should  have  administered  our  reproof  in  a  much  more 
lenient  shape  and  style.  The  truth  is,  we  from  the  beginning 
saw  marks  of  feeling  and  power  in  Mr  Keats's  verses,  which  made 
us  think  it  very  likely,  he  might  become  a  real  poet  in  England, 
provided  he  could  be  persuaded  to  give  up  all  the  tricks  of  Cock- 
neyism,  and  forswear  for  ever  the  thin  potations  of  Mr  Leigh 
Hunt.  We,  therefore,  rated  him  as  roundly  as  we  decently  could 
do,  for  the  flagrant  affectations  of  those  early  productions  of  his. 
In  the  last  volume  he  has  published  we  find  more  beauties  than 
in  the  former,  both  of  language  and  of  thought,  but  we  are  sorry 
to  say,  we  find  abundance  of  the  same  absurd  affectations  also, 
and  superficial  conceits,  which  first  displeased  us  in  his  writings; 

*  Morgan  MSS.    Some  words  at  the  end  have  baflfled  the  transcriber. 


478  AND  IMPERTINENCE 

— and  which  we  are  again  very  sorry  to  say,  must  in  our  opinion, 
if  persisted  in,  utterly  and  entirely  prevent  Mr  Keats  from  ever 
taking  his  place  among  the  pure  and  classical  poets  of  his  mother 
tongue.  It  is  quite  ridiculous  to  see  how  the  vanity  of  these  Cock- 
neys makes  them  overrate  their  own  importance,  even  in  the 
eyes  of  us,  that  have  always  expressed  such  plain  unvarnished 
contempt  for  them,  and  who  do  feel  for  them  all,  a  contempt  too 
calm  and  profound,  to  admit  of  any  admixture  of  anything  like 
anger  or  personal  spleen.  We  should  just  as  soon  think  of  being 
wroth  with  vermin,  independently  of  their  coming  into  our 
apartment,  as  we  should  of  having  any  feelings  at  all  about  any 
of  these  people,  other  than  what  are  excited  by  seeing  them  in 
the  shape  of  authors.  Many  of  them,  considered  in  any  other 
character  than  that  of  authors,  are,  we  have  no  doubt,  entitled 
to  be  considered  as  very  worthy  people  in  their  own  way.  Mr 
Hunt  is  said  to  be  a  very  amiable  man  in  his  own  sphere,  and  we 
believe  him  to  be  so  willingly.  Mr  Keats  we  have  often  heard 
spoken  of  in  terms  of  great  kindness,  and  we  have  no  doubt  his 
manners  and  feelings  are  calculated  to  make  his  friends  love  him. 
But  what  has  all  this  to  do  with  our  opinion  of  their  poetry? 
What,  in  the  name  of  wonder,  does  it  concern  us,  whether  these 
men  sit  among  themselves,  with  mild  or  with  sulky  faces,  eating 
their  mutton  steaks,  and  drinking  their  porter  at  Highgate, 
Hampstead,  or  Lisson  Green  ?  .  .  .  Last  of  all,  what  should  forbid 
us  to  announce  our  opinion,  that  Mr  Shelley,  as  a  man  of  genius, 
is  not  merely  superior,  either  to  Mr  Hunt,  or  to  Mr  Keats,  but 
altogether  out  of  their  sphere,  and  totally  incapable  of  ever  being 
brought  into  the  most  distant  comparison  with  either  of  them. 


The  critical  utterance  on  Keats's  side  likely  to  tell 
most  with  general  readers  was  that  of  Jeffrey  in  the 
Edinburgh  Review.  A  year  earlier  Keats  had  written 
from  Winchester  expressing  impatience  at  what  he 
thought  the  cowardice  of  the  Edinburgh  in  keeping 
silence  as  to  Endymion  in  face  of  the  Quarterly  attack. 
*They  do  not  know  what  to  make  of  it,  and  they  will 
not  praise  it  for  fear.  They  are  as  shy  of  it  as  I  should 
be  of  wearing  a  Quaker's  hat.  The  fact  is  they  have 
no  real  taste.  They  dare  not  compromise  their  judg- 
ments on  so  puzzling  a  question.  If  on  my  next  publi- 
cation they  should  praise  me,  and  so  lug  in  Endymion, 
I  will  address  them  in  a  manner  they  will  not  at  all 
relish.    The  cowardliness  of  the  Edinburgh  is  more  than 


JEFFREY  IN  THE  EDINBURGH  479 

the  abuse  of  the  Quarterly/  Exactly  what  Keats  had 
anticipated  now  took  place.  Jeffrey's  natural  taste  in 
poetry  was  conservative,  and  favoured  the  correct, 
the  classical  and  traditional:  but  in  this  case,  whether 
from  genuine  and  personal  opinion,  or  to  please  influential 
well-wishers  of  Keats  on  his  own  side  in  politics  and 
criticism  lilce  Sir  James  Mackintosh,  he  on  the  appearance 
of  the  new  volume  took  occasion  to  print,  now  when 
Keats  was  far  past  caring  about  it,  an  article  on  his 
work  which  was  mainly  in  eulogy  of  Endymion:  eulogy 
not  immixed  with  reasonable  criticism,  but  in  a  strain, 
on  the  whole,  gushing  almost  to  excess: — 

We  had  never  happened  to  see  either  of  these  volumes  till 
very  lately — and  have  been  exceedingly  struck  with  the  genius 
they  display,  and  the  spirit  of  poetry  which  breathes  through  all 
their  extravagance.  That  imitation  of  our  older  writers,  and 
especially  of  our  older  dramatists,  to  which  w€{  cannot  help 
flattering  ourselves  that  we  have  somewhat  contributed,  has 
brought  on,  as  it  were,  a  second  spring  in  our  poetry; — and  few 
of  its  blossoms  are  either  more  profuse  of  sweetness  or  richer  in 
promise  than  this  which  is  now  before  us.  Mr  Keats,  we  under- 
stand, is  still  a  very  young  man;  and  his  whole  works,  indeed, 
bear  evidence  enough  of  the  fact.  They  are  full  of  extravagance 
and  irregularity,  rash  attempts  at  originality,  interminable 
wanderings,  and  excessive  obscurity.  They  manifestly  require, 
therefore,  all  the  indulgence  that  can  be  claimed  for  a  first 
attempt:  but  we  think  it  no  less  plain  that  they  deserve  it; 
for  they  are  flushed  all  over  with  the  rich  lights  of  fancy,  and'so 
coloured  and  bestrewn  with  the  flowers  of  poetry,  that  even 
while  perplexed  and  bewildered  in  their  labyrinths,  it  is  im- 
possible to  resist  the  intoxication  of  their  sweetness,  or  to  shut 
our  hearts  to  the  enchantments  they  so  lavishly  present.  The 
models  upon  which  he  has  formed  himself,  in  the  Endymion,  the 
earliest  and  by  much  the  most  considerable  of  his  poems,  are 
obviously  the  Faithful  Shepherdess  of  Fletcher,  and  the  Sad 
Shepherd  of  Ben  Jonson; — the  exquisite  metres  and  inspired 
diction  of  which  he  has  copied  with  great  boldness  and  fidelity — 
and,  like  his  great  originals,  has  also  contrived  to  impart  to  the 
whole  piece  that  true  rural  and  poetical  air  which  breathes  only 
in  them  and  in  Theocritus — ^which  is  at  once  homely  and  majestic, 
luxurious  and  rude,  and  sets  before  us  the  genuine  sights  and 
sounds  and  smells  of  the  country,  with  all  the  magic  and  grace  of 
Elysium. 


480     APPEECIATION  FULL  THOUGH  TARDY 

Then,  after  acknowledgment  of  the  confusedness  of  the 
narrative  and  the  fantastic  wilfulness  of  some  of  the 
incidents  and  style,  the  critic  goes  on: — 

There  is  no  work,  accordingly,  from  which  a  malicious  critic 
could  cull  more  matter  for  ridicule,  or  select  more  obscure,  un- 
natural, or  absurd  passages.  But  we  do  not  take  that  to  be  our 
office: — and  just  beg  leave,  on  the  contrary,  to  say,  that  any  one 
who,  on  this  account,  would  represent  the  whole  poem  as  de- 
spicable, must  either  have  no  notion  of  poetry,  or  no  regard  to 
truth.  It  is,  in  truth,  at  least  as  full  of  genius  as  of  absurdity; 
and  he  who  does  not  find  a  great  deal  in  it  to  admire  and  to  give 
delight,  cannot  in  his  heart  see  much  beauty  in  the  two  exquisite 
dramas  to  which  we  have  already  alluded,  or  find  any  great 
pleasure  in  some  of  the  finest  creations  of  Milton  and  Shake- 
speare. There  are  many  such  persons,  we  verily  believe,  even 
among  the  reading  and  judicious  part  of  the  community — correct 
scholars  we  have  no  doubt  many  of  them,  and,  it  may  be,  very 
classical  composers  in  prose  and  in  verse — but  utterly  ignorant 
of  the  true  genius  of  English  poetry,  and  incapable  of  estimating 
its  appropriate  and  most  exquisite  beauties.  With  that  spirit 
we  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  Mr  K.  is  deeply  imbued — 
and  of  those  beauties  he  has  presented  us  with  many  striking 
examples.  We  are  very  much  inclined  indeed  to  add,  that  we 
do  not  know  any  book  which  we  would  sooner  employ  as  a  test 
to  ascertain  whether  any  one  had  in  him  a  native  relish  for  poetry, 
and  a  genuine  sensibility  to  its  intrinsic  charm. 

One  immediate  result  of  the  Edinburgh  criticism  was 
to  provoke  an  almost  incredible  outburst  of  jealous  fury 
on  the  part  of  the  personage  then  most  conspicuous  on 
the  stage  of  England's,  nay  of  the  world's,  poetry. 
Lord  Byron.  Byron,  with  next  to  no  real  critical  power, 
could  bring  dazzling  resources  of  wit  and  rhetoric  to 
the  support  of  any  random  opinion,  traditional  or  rev- 
olutionary, he  might  happen  by  whim  or  habit  to 
entertain.  In  these  days  he  was  Just  entering  the  lists 
as  a  self-appointed  champion  of  Pope,  the  artificial 
school,  and  eighteenth-century  critical  tradition  in 
general,  against  Pope's  latest  editor  and  depredator, 
the  clerical  sonneteer  William  Lisle  Bowles.  Ever  since 
the  Pope-Boileau  passage  in  Keats's  Sleep  and  Poetry 
it  had  been   Byron's  pleasure  to  regard   Keats  with 


FURY  OF  BYRON  481 

gratuitous  contempt  and  aversion.  When  Murray  sent 
him  the  Lamia  volimae  with  a  parcel  of  other  books  to 
Ravenna,  he  wrote  back,  'Pray  send  me  no  more  poetry 
but  what  is  rare  and  decidedly  good.  There  is  such  a 
trash  of  Keats  and  the  like  upon  my  tables  that  I  am 
ashamed  to  look  at  them.  ...  No  more  Keats,  I  entreat; 
— ^fiay  him  alive;  if  some  of  you  don't  I  must  skin  him 
myself;  there  is  no  bearing  the  drivelling  idiotism  of 
the  Mankin.'  A  month  later,  evidently  not  having  read 
a  word  of  Keats's  book,  he  comes  across  Jeffrey's  praise 
of  it  in  the  Edinburgh  Review,  and  thereupon  falls  into 
a  fit  of  anger  so  foul-mouthed  and  outrageous  that  his 
latest,  far  from  squeamish  editors  have  had  to  mask 
its  grossness  under  a  cloud  of  asterisks.  A  Httle  later 
he  repeats  the  same  disgusting  obscenities  in  cool  blood: 
his  only  quotable  remark  on  the  subject  being  as 
follows: — 'Of  the  praises  of  that  little  dirty  blackguard 
Keates  in  the  Edinburgh,  I  shall  observe  as  Johnson  did 
when  Sheridan  the  actor  got  a  pension:  "What,  has 
he  got  a  pension?  Then  it  is  time  I  should  give  up 
mine.^^  Nobody  could  be  prouder  of  the  praises  of  the 
Edinburgh  than  I  was,  or  more  alive  to  their  censure. 
At  present  all  the  men  they  have  ever  praised  are 
degraded  by  that  insane  article.'  By  and  by  he  pro- 
ceeded to  administer  his  own  castigation  to  'Mr  John 
Ketch'  in  a  second  letter  written  for  the  Pope-Bowles 
controversy:  but  Keats  having  died  meanwhile  he 
withheld  this  from  publication,  and  a  little  later,  perhaps 
at  the  prompting  of  his  own  better  mind,  but  more 
probably  through  the  good  influence  of  Shelley,  took 
in  Don  Juan  the  altered  tone  about  Keats  which  all 
the  world  knows,  and  having  been  at  first  thus  savagely 
bent  on  hunting  with  the  hounds,  turned  and  chose  to 
run  part  of  the  way,  as  far  as  suited  him,  with  the  hare. 
Shelley,  of  course,  judged  for  himself;  was  incapable 
of  a  thought  towards  a  brother  poet  that  was  not  gene- 
rous; and  had  moreover  a  feeling  of  true  and  particular 
kindness  towards  Keats.  We  have  seen  how  wisely 
and  fairly  he  judged  Endymion.    Were  we  to  take  merely 


482  SHELLEY  ON  HYPERION 

his  own  words  written  at  the  time,  we  might  think  that 
he  failed  to  do  justice  to  the  new  volume  as  a  whole. 
His  first  impression  of  it,  coupled  with  a  wildly  over- 
drawn picture  which  had  reached  him  of  Keats's  suffer- 
ings under  the  stings  of  the  reviewers,  apparently 
determined  him  to  sit  down  and  draft  that  indignant 
letter  to  Gifford,  never  completed  or  dehvered,  pleading 
against  the  repetition  of  any  such  treatment  of  his  new 
volume  as  Endymion  had  received  from  the  Quarterly, 
In  this  Shelley  speaks  of  Hyperion  as  though  it  were 
the  one  thing  he  admired  in  the  book:  and  writing 
about  the  same  time  to  Peacock,  he  says,  'Among 
modern  things  which  have  reached  me  is  a  volume  of 
poems  by  Keats;  in  other  respects  insignificant  enough, 
but  containing  the  fragment  of  a  poem  called  Hyperion. 
I  dare  say  you  have  not  time  to  read  it;  but  it  certainly 
is  an  astonishing  piece  of  writing,  and  gives  me  a  con- 
ception of  Keats  which  I  confess  I  had  not  before.'  And 
again,  'Among  your  anathemas  of  modern  poetry,  do 
you  include  Keats's  Hyperion^  I  think  it  very  fine. 
His  other  poems  are  worth  little;  but  if  the  Hyperion 
be  not  grand  poetry,  none  has  been  produced  by  our 
contemporaries.'  In  considering  these  utterances  we 
should  remember  that  they  were  addressed  to  corre- 
spondents bound  to  be  unsympathetic.  Gifford  would 
be  so  as  a  matter  of  course:  while  Peacock  had  from 
old  Marlow  days  been  a  disbeliever  in  Keats  and  his 
poetry,  and  had  lately  adopted  a  pubhc  attitude  of 
disbelief  in  modern  poetry  altogether.  We  must  also 
remember  that  Shelley  had  himself  been  wrought  into 
a  mood  of  imwonted  intolerance  of  certain  fashions  in 
poetiy  by  some  of  Barry  Cornwall's  recent  performances, 
which  he  held  to  be  an  out-Himting  of  Hunt  and  out- 
Byroning  of  Byron.^  There  is  a  statement  of  Medwin's 
which,  if  Medwin  were  ever  a  witness  much  to  be 
trusted,  we  would  rather  take  as  representing  Shelley's 
ripened  and  permanent  opinion  of  the  contents  of  the 
Lamia  volume  than  his  own  words  to  Gifford  or  Peacock. 

*  Letters  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley,  ed.  Ingpen,  vol.  ii,  p.  839. 


AND  ON  KEATS  IN  GENERAL  483 

'He  perceived/  says  Medwin,  'in  every  one  of  these 
productions  a  marked  and  continually  progressing  im- 
provement, and  hailed  with  delight  his  release  from  his 
leading  strings,  his  emancipation  from  what  he  called 
a  "perverse  and  limited  school/'  The  Pot  of  Basil 
and  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes  he  read  and  re-read  with  ever 
new  delight,  and  looked  upon  Hyperion  as  almost  fault- 
less, grieving  that  it  was  but  a  fragment  and  that  Keats 
had  not  been  encouraged  to  complete  a  work  worthy 
of  Milton.'  At  all  events  Shelley,  apart  from  the 
immortal  tribute  of  Adonais,  has  left  other  words  of 
his  own  which  may  content  us,  addressed  to  a  different 
correspondent,  as  to  what  he  felt  about  Keats  and  his 
work  and  promise  on  the  whole,  without  reference  to 
one  poem  rather  than  another.  I  mean  those  in  which 
he  expresses  to  Mrs  Leigh  Hunt  his  hope  to  see  and 
take  care  of  Keats  in  Italy: — 'I  consider  his  a  most 
valuable  life,  and  I  am  deeply  interested  in  his  safety. 
I  intend  to  be  the  physician  both  of  his  body  and  of  his 
soul,  to  keep  the  one  warm,  and  to  teach  the  other 
Greek  and  Spanish.  I  am  aware,  indeed,  in  part,  that 
I  am  nourishing  a  rival  who  will  far  surpass  me;  and 
this  is  an  additional  motive,  and  will  be  an  added 
pleasure.' 

The  opinions  of  neither  of  these  two  famous  men, 
Byron  and  Shelley,  will  have  had  any  immediate  effect 
in  England.  Murray  could  not  possibly  disseminate 
Byron's  private  obscenities,  and  Byron's  own  intended 
pubHc  castigation  of  Keats  in  a  second  letter  to  Bowles 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  withheld.  On  the  other  side 
Shelley  made  no  public  use  of  the  draft  of  his  indignant 
letter  to  Gifford,  and  Peacock  would  not  be  by  way  of 
saying  much  about  his  private  expressions  of  enthusiasm 
for  Hyperion.  But  we  can  gather  the  impression  current 
in  sympathetic  circles  about  Keats's  future  from  a 
couple  of  entries  in  the  December  diaries  of  Crabb 
Robinson.  He  tells  how  he  has  been  reading  out  some 
of  the  new  volume,  first  Hyperion  and  then  The  Pot  of 
Basil,  to  his  friends  the  Aders',  and  adds, — 'There  is 


484    IMPRESSIONS  OF  CRABB  ROBINSON 

a  force,  wildness,  and  originality  in  the  works  of  this 
young  poet  which,  if  his  perilous  Journey  to  Italy  does 
not  destroy  him,  promise  to  place  him  at  the  head  of 
our  next  generation  of  poets.  Lamb  places  him  next 
to  Wordsworth — ^not  meaning  any  comparison,  for  they 
are  dissimilar'  .  .  .  and  again,  ^I  am  greatly  mistaken 
if  Keats  do  not  soon  take  a  high  place  among  our  poets. 
Great  feeling  and  a  powerful  imagination  are  shown  in 
this  little  volume.'  Had  his  health  held  out,  such 
recognition  would  have  been  all  and  more  than  all 
Keats  asked  for  or  would  have  thought  he  had  yet 
earned.  But  praise  and  dispraise  were  all  one  to  him 
before  now,  and  we  must  go  back  and  follow  the  tragedy 
of  his  personal  history  to  its  close. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

AUGUST  1820-FEBRUARY  1821:    VOYAGE  TO  ITALY: 
LAST  DAYS  AND  DEATH  AT  ROME 

Resolve  to  winter  in  Italy — Severn  as  companion — The  'Maria  Crowther' 
— Fellow  passengers — Storm  in  the  Channel — Held  up  in  the  Solent — 
Landing  near  Lulworth — The  'Bright  Star'  sonnets — The  voyage 
resumed — A  meditated  poem — Incidents  at  sea — Quarantine  at  Naples 
— Letters  from  Keats  and  Haslam — Lady  passengers  described — A 
cry  of  agony — Neapohtan  impressions — On  the  road  to  Rome — Life 
at  Rome — Apparent  improvement — Relapse  and  despair — Severn's 
ministrations — His  letters  from  the  sickroom — The  same  continued 
— ^Tranquil  last  days — Choice  of  epitaph — Spirit  of  charm  and  pleasant- 
ness— The  end. 

In  telling  of  the  critical  reception  of  Keats's  Lamia 
volume  I  have  anticipated  by  three  or  four  months  the 
course  of  time.  Returning  to  his  personal  condition 
and  doings,  we  find  that  by  or  before  the  date  of  his 
move  from  Kentish  Town  to  be  under  the  care  of  the 
Brawne  ladies  at  Wentworth  Place,  that  is  by  mid- 
August,  he  had  accepted  the  verdict  of  the  doctors  that 
a  winter  in  Italy  would  be  the  only  thing  to  give  him  a 
chance  of  recovery.  He  determined  accordingly,  not 
without  sore  gain-giving  and  agitation  of  mind,  to  make 
the  attempt.  In  his  letter  to  Shelley  acknowledging 
receipt  of  The  Cenci  and  answering  Shelley's  invitation 
to  Pisa,  he  writes: — Hhere  is  no  doubt  that  an  English 
winter  would  put  an  end  to  me,  and  do  so  in  a  lingering, 
hateful,  manner.  Therefore,  I  must  either  voyage  or 
journey  to  Italy,  as  a  soldier  marches  up  to  a  battery'. 
And  again,  using  the  same  phrase,  he  writes  to  Taylor 
on  August  14th: — ^This  journey  to  Italy  wakes  me  at 
dayhght  every  morning,   and  haimts  me  horribly.    I 

485 


486        RESOLVE  TO  WINTER  IN  ITALY 

shall  endeavour  to  go,  though  it  will  be  with  the  sensa- 
tion of  marching  against  a  battery.  The  first  step 
towards  it  is  to  know  the  expense  of  a  journey  and  a 
year's  residence,  which  if  you  will  ascertain  for  me, 
and  let  me  know  early,  you  will  greatly  serve  me.'  The 
next  day  he  sends  Taylor  a  note  of  his  wish  that  in 
case  of  his  death  his  books  should  be  divided  among 
his  friends  and  that  any  assets  arising  or  to  arise  from 
the  sale  of  his  poems  should  be  devoted  to  paying  his 
debts — ^those  to  Brown  and  to  Taylor  himself  ranking 
first.  The  good  publisher  promptly  bestirred  himself 
to  enquire  about  sailings  and  make  provision  for  ways 
and  means.  For  the  latter  purpose  he  bought  the  copy- 
right of  Endymion  for  £100,  a  sum  probably  beyond 
any  value  that  it  can  then  have  seemed  likely  to  possess, 
and  procured  promises  of  help  to  the  extent  of  £100 
more  by  subscription  among  persons  interested  in  the 
poet's  fate;  James  Rice  and  the  painters  Hilton  and 
De  Wint  being  among  guarantors  of  £10  each  and  Lord 
Fitzwilliam  closing  the  list  with  a  promise  of  £50. 

The  vessel  chosen  for  the  voyage  was  a  merchant 
brigantine,  the  ^  Maria  Crowther,'  having  berth  accom- 
modation for  a  few  passengers  and  due  to  sail  from 
London  about  the  middle  of  September.  The  four  inter- 
vening weeks  were  spent  by  the  invalid  in  comparative 
respite  from  suffering  and  distress  under  the  eye  and 
tendance  of  his  beloved.  By  his  desire  Haydon  came 
one  day  to  see  him,  and  has  told,  with  a  painter's  touch, 
how  he  found  him  'lying  in  a  white  bed,  with  white 
quilt,  and  white  sheets,  the  only  colour  visible  was  the 
hectic  flush  of  his  cheeks.'  Haydon's  vehement,  self- 
confident  and  self-righteous  manner  of  admonition  to 
friends  in  trouble  seems  to  have  had  an  effect  the  reverse 
of  consolatory,  and  elsewhere  he  amplifies  this  account 
of  his  last  sight  of  Keats,  saying,  'He  seemed  to  be 
going  out  of  life  with  a  contempt  for  this  world  and  no 
hopes  of  the  other.  I  told  him  to  be  calm,  but  he 
muttered  that  if  he  did  not  soon  get  better  he  would 
destroy  himself.    I  tried  to  reason  against  such  violence, 


SEVERN  AS  COMPANION  487 

but  it  was  no  use;  he  grew  angry,  and  I  went  away 
deeply  affected/  Writing  about  the  same  time  to  his 
young  sister,  Keats  shows  himself,  as  ever,  thoughtful 
and  wise  on  her  behalf  and  does  his  best  to  be  re-assuring 
on  his  own: — 

Now  you  are  better,  keep  so.  Do  not  suffer  your  Mind  to  dwell 
on  unpleasant  reflexions — that  sort  of  thing  has  been  the  destruc- 
tion of  my  health.  Nothing  is  so  bad  as  want  of  health — it  makes 
one  envy  scavengers  and  cinder  sifters.  There  are  enough  real 
distresses  and  evils  in  wait  for  every  one  to  try  the  most  vigorous 
health.  Not  that  I  would  say  yours  are  not  real — ^but  they  are 
such  as  to  tempt  you  to  employ  your  imagination  on  them, 
rather  than  endeavour  to  dismiss  them  entirely.  Do  not  diet 
your  mind  with  grief,  it  destroys  the  constitution;  but  let  your 
chief  care  be  of  your  health,  and  with  that  you  will  meet  your 
share  of  Pleasure  in  the  world — do  not  doubt  it.  If  I  return  well 
from  Italy  I  will  turn  over  a  new  leaf  for  you.  I  have  been  im- 
proving lately,  and  have  very  good  hopes  of  'turning  a  Neuk' 
and  cheating  the  consumption. 

For  a  companion  on  his  journey,  Keats's  first  thoughts 
turned  to  Brown,  who  was  still  away  on  his  second 
tramp  through  the  Highlands.  But  the  letter  he  wrote 
asking  whether  Brown  could  go  with  him  missed  its 
destination,  and  he  was  left  with  the  prospect  of  ha\dng 
either  to  give  up  his  journey  or  venture  on  it  alone,  a 
thing  hardly  to  be  thought  of  in  his  state  of  health. 
At  this  juncture  Haslam,  always  the  most  useful  of 
friends  in  an  emergency,  betook  himself  to  Severn, 
whose  prospects  in  London,  in  spite  of  the  practice  he 
had  found  as  a  miniature-painter  and  of  his  success  in 
winning  the  gold  medal  of  the  Academy  the  previous 
December,  seemed  far  from  bright,  and  urged  him  to 
go  out  with  Keats  to  Rome.  Severn  at  once  consented, 
his  immediate  impulse  of  devotion  to  his  friend  being 
strengthened,  on  reflection,  both  by  the  lure  of  Rome 
itself  and  by  the  idea  that  he  might  be  able  while  there 
to  work  for,  and  perhaps  win,  the  travelling  studentship 
of  the  Royal  Academy.  He  made  his  arrangements  on 
the  shortest  possible  notice,  while  Haslam  undertook 
the  business  of  procuring  passports  and  the  like.    A 


488  THE  ^  MARIA  CROWTHER' 

weird  incident  marked  Severn^s  departure  from  his 
home.  His  father,  passionately  attached  to  him  but 
resenting  his  resolve  to  go  to  Italy  now  as  fiercely  as 
he  had  before  resented  his  change  of  profession,  on  being 
asked  to  lend  a  hand  in  moving  his  trunk,  in  an  uncon- 
trollable fit  of  anger  struck  and  felled  him.  How  and 
with  what  rending  of  the  heart  Keats  took  his  own 
farewell  from  the  home  of  his  joy  and  torment  at  Hamp- 
stead — of  this  we  hear,  and  may  be  thankful  to  hear, 
nothing.  He  spent  his  last  days  in  England  with  Taylor 
in  Fleet  Street,  having  gone  thither  on  Wednesday 
September  13th  to  be  at  hand  for  the  day  and  hour 
when  the  'Maria  Crowther^  might  be  ready  to  sail.  On 
the  evening  of  Sunday  the  17th  of  September  he  and 
Severn  went  on  board  at  the  London  docks.  Here 
the  kind  Taylor  and  the  serviceable  Haslam  took  leave 
of  them,  and  their  ship  weighed  anchor  and  slipped  down 
tide  as  far  as  Gravesend,  where  she  came  to  moorings 
for  the  night.  Moored  close  by  her  was  a  smack  from 
Dundee,  and  on  board  this  smack,  by  one  of  the  minor 
perversities  of  fate,  who  should  be  a  passenger  but 
Charles  Brown?  He  had  caught  this  means  of  con- 
veyance as  the  first  available  when  he  at  last  got  news 
of  Keats's  plans,  and  had  hoped  to  reach  London  in 
time  to  bid  him  farewell.  But  it  was  all  unknowingly 
that  the  friends  lay  that  night  within  earshot  of  one 
another. 

One  lady  passenger,  a  Miss  Pidgeon,  had  come  aboard 
at  the  docks:  a  pleasing  person,  the  friends  thought 
at  first,  but  found  reason  to  change  their  minds  later. 
At  Gravesend  early  the  next  morning  there  came  another, 
a  pretty  and  gentle  Miss  Cotterell,  as  far  gone  in  con- 
sumption as  Keats  himself.  Keats  was  in  lively  spirits 
and  exerted  himself  with  Severn  to  welcome  and  amuse 
the  new  comer.  In  the  course  of  the  day  Severn  went 
ashore  to  buy  medicines  and  other  needments  for  the 
voyage,  and  among  them,  at  Keats's  special  request,  a 
bottle  of  laudanum.  The  captain,  by  name  Thomas 
Walsh,  was  kind  and  attentive  and  did  his  best,  un- 


FELLOW  PASSENGERS  489 

successfully,  to  find  a  goat  for  the  supply  of  goat's  millc 
to  the  invalids  while  on  board  ship.  That  evening  they 
put  to  sea,  and  Keats's  health  and  spirits  seemed  to 
rise  with  the  first  excitements  of  the  voyage.  The 
events  of  the  next  days  are  best  told  in  the  words  of  the 
journal-letter  written  at  the  time  by  Severn  to  Haslam; 
vagueness  of  memory  having  made  much  less  trustworthy 
the  several  accounts  of  the  voyage  which  he  wrote  and 
rewrote  in  after  years.  Severn  was  innocent  of  all  stops 
save  dashes,  and  I  print  exactly  as  he  wrote: — 

19th  Sept.  Tuesday,  off  Dover  Castle,  etc. 

I  arose  at  day  break  to  see  the  glorious  eastern  gate — 
Keats  slept  till  7 — Miss  C.  was  rather  ill  this  morning  I  prevailed 
on  her  to  walk  the  deck  with  me  at  half  past  6  she  recovered 
much — Keats  was  still  better  this  morning  and  Mrs  Pidgeon 
looked  and  was  the  picture  of  health — but  poor  me !  I  began  to 
feel  a  waltzing  on  my  stomach  at  breakfast  when  I  wrote  the  note 
to  you  I  was  going  it  most  soundly — Miss  Cotterell  followed  me 
— then  Keats  who  did  it  in  the  most  gentlemanly  manner — and 
then  the  saucy  Mrs  Pidgeon  who  had  been  laughing  at  us — four 
faces  bequeathing  to  the  mighty  deep  their  breakfasts — here  I 
must  change  to  a  minor  key  Miss  C.  fainted — ^we  soon  recovered 
her — I  was  very  ill  nothing  but  lying  down  would  do  for  me. 
Keats  ascended  his  bed — from  which  he  dictated  surgically  like 
Esculapius  of  old  in  basso-relievo  through  him  Miss  C.  was 
recovered  we  had  a  cup  of  tea  each  and  no  more  went  to  bed  and 
slept  until  it  was  time  to  go  to  bed — we  could  not  get  up  again — 
and  slept  in  our  clothes  all  night — Keats  the  King — not  even 
looking  pale. 

20th  Sept.  Wednesday  off  Brighton.  Beautiful  morning — 
we  all  breakfasted  on  deck  and  recovered  as  we  were  could  enjoy 
it — about  10  Keats  said  a  storm  was  hatching — he  was  right — 
the  rain  came  on  and  we  retired  to  our  cabin — it  abated  and  once 
more  we  came  on  deck — at  2  storm  came  on  furiously — ^we  retired 
to  our  beds.  The  rolling  of  the  ship  was  death  to  us — towards  4 
it  increased  and  our  situation  was  alarming — the  trunks  rolled 
across  the  cabin — the  water  poured  in  from  the  sky-light  and  we 
were  tumbled  from  one  side  to  the  other  of  our  beds — my  curiosity 
was  raised  to  see  the  storm — and  my  anxiety  to  see  Keats  for  I 
could  only  speak  to  him  when  in  bed — I  got  up  and  fell  down  on 
the  floor  from  my  weakness  and  the  rolling  of  the  ship.  Keats 
was   very   calm — the   ladies   were   much   frightened   and   would 


490  STORM  IN  THE  CHANNEL 

scarce  speak — ^when  I  got  up  to  the  deck  I  was  astounded — the 
waves  were  in  mountains  and  washed  the  ship — the  watery 
horizon  was  Hke  a  mountainous  country — but  the  ship's  motion 
was  beautifully  to  the  sea  falling  from  one  wave  to  the  other  in 
a  very  lovely  manner — the  sea  each  time  crossing  the  deck  and 
one  side  of  the  ship  being  level  with  the  water — this  when  I 
understood  gave  me  perfect  ease — I  communicated  below  and 
it  did  the  same — but  when  the  dusk  came  the  sea  began  to  rush 
in  from  the  side  of  our  cabin  from  an  opening  in  the  planks — this 
made  us  rather  long  faced — for  it  came  by  pail-fulls — again  I 
got  out  and  said  to  Keats  *  here's  pretty  music  for  you' — with 
the  greatest  calmness  he  answered  me  only  by  'Water  parted 
from  the  sea.'  ^  I  staggered  up  again  and  the  storm  was  awful 
— the  Captain  and  Mate  soon  came  down — for  our  things  were 
squashing  about  in  the  dark — they  struck  a  light  and  I  suc- 
ceeded in  getting  my  desk  off  the  ground — with  clothes  and  books, 
etc.  The  Captain  finding  it  could  not  be  stopped — tacked  about 
from  our  voyage — and  the  sea  ceased  to  dash  against  the  cabin 
for  we  were  sailing  against  wind  and  tide — but  the  horrible 
agitation  continued  in  the  ship  lengthways — here  were  the 
pumps  working — the  sails  squalling  the  confused  voices  of  the 
sailors — the  things  rattling  about  in  every  direction  and  us  poor 
devils  pinn'd  up  in  our  beds  like  ghosts  by  daylight — except 
Keats  he  was  himself  all  the  time — the  ladies  suffered  the  most 
— but  I  was  out  of  bed  a  dozen  times  to  wait  on  them  and  tell 
them  there  was  no  danger — my  sickness  made  me  get  into  bed 
very  soon  each  time — but  Keats  this  morning  brags  of  my 
sailorship — he  says  could  I  have  kept  on  my  legs  in  the  water 
cabin  I  should  have  been  a  standing  miracle. 


20th  Sept. 

I  caught  a  sight  of  the  moon  about  3  o'clock  this  morning 
— and  ran  down  to  tell  the  glad  tidings — but  the  surly  rolling  of 
the  sea  was  worse  than  the  storm — the  ship  trembled  to  it — and 
the  sea  was  scarcely  calmed  by  daylight — so  that  we  were 
kept  from  2  o'clock  yesterday  until  6  this  morning  without 
anything — well  it  has  done  us  good,  we  are  like  a  Quartett  of 
fighting  cocks  this  morning.  The  morning  is  serene  we  are  now 
back  again  some  20  miles — waiting  for  a  wind — but  full  of  spirits 
— Keats  is  without  even  complaining  and  Miss  Cottrell  has  a 
colour  in  her  face — the  sea  has  done  his  worst  upon  us.  I  am 
better  than  I  have  been  for  years.     Farewell  my  dear  fellow. 

J.  Severn — show  this  to  my  family  with  my  love  to  them. 

*  A  long-popular  song  from  Ame's  opera  Artaxerxes. 


HELD  UP  IN  THE  SOLENT  491 

When  you  read  this  you  will  excuse  the  manner — I  am 
quite  beside  myself — and  have  written  the  whole  this  morning 
Thursday  on  the  deck  after  a  sleepless  night  and  with  a  head 
full  of  care — you  shall  have  a  better  the  next  time. 

The  storm  had  driven  them  back  from  off  Brighton 
more  than  half  way  to  the  Downs,  and  then  abated  enough 
to  let  them  land  for  a  scramble  on  the  shingles  at  Dmige- 
ness,  where  they  excited  the  suspicions  of  the  coast 
guard,  and  to  get  the  above  letter  posted  from  Romne)^ 
After  this  calms  and  contrary  airs  kept  them  beating 
about  the  channel  for  many  more  days  yet.  At  Ports- 
mouth they  were  held  up  again,  and  to  pass  the  time 
Keats  landed  and  went  to  call  on  Dilke's  sister  Mrs 
Snook  at  Bedhampton;  again  by  ill  chance  barely 
missing  Brown,  whom  he  supposed  to  be  still  in  Scotland 
but  who  was  actually  only  ten  miles  away,  having  run 
down  to  stay  with  Dilke's  father  at  Chichester.  The 
next  day,  while  the  ship  was  still  hanging  in  the  Solent 
off  Yarmouth,  Keats  wrote  unbosoming  himseff  to  Brown 
of  his  inward  agony  more  fully  than  he  had  ever  done 
in  speech: — 

I  wish  to  write  on  subjects  that  will  not  agitate  me  much — 
there  is  one  I  must  mention  and  have  done  with  it.  Even  if  my 
body  would  recover  of  itself,  this  would  prevent  it.  The  very  thing 
which  I  want  to  live  most  for  will  be  a  great  occasion  of  my  death. 
I  cannot  help  it.  Who  can  help  it?  Were  I  in  health  it  would 
make  me  ill,  and  how  can  I  bear  it  in  my  state?  I  dare  say  you 
will  be  able  to  guess  on  what  subject  I  am  harping — you  know 
what  was  my  greatest  pain  during  the  first  part  of  my  illness  at 
your  house.  I  wish  for  death  every  day  and  night  to  deliver  me 
from  these  pains,  and  then  I  wish  death  away,  for  death  would 
destroy  even  those  pains  which  are  better  than  nothing.  Land 
and  sea,  weakness  and  decline,  are  great  separators,  but  death 
is  the  great  divorcer  for  ever.  When  the  pang  of  this  thought 
has  passed  through  my  mind,  I  may  say  the  bitterness  of  death 
is  passed.  I  often  wish  for  you  that  you  might  flatter  me  with 
the  best.  I  think  without  my  mentioning  it  for  my  sake  you 
would  be  a  friend  to  Miss  Brawne  when  I  am  dead.  You  think 
she  has  many  faults — but,  for  my  sake,  think  she  has  not  one. 
If  there  is  anything  you  can  do  for  her  by  word  or  deed  I  know 
you  will  do  it.     I  am  in  a  state  at  present  in  which  woman  merely 


492  LANDING  NEAR  LULWORTH 

as  woman  can  have  no  more  power  over  me  than  stocks  and 
stones,  and  yet  the  difference  of  my  sensations  with  respect  to 
Miss  Brawne  and  my  sister  is  amazing.  The  one  seems  to  absorb 
the  other  to  a  degree  incredible.  I  seldom  think  of  my  brother 
and  sister  in  America.  The  thought  of  leaving  Miss  Brawne  is 
beyond  everything  horrible — the  sense  of  darkness  coming  over 
me — I  eternally  see  her  figure  eternally  vanishing.  Some  of  the 
phrases  she  was  in  the  habit  of  using  during  my  last  nursing  at 
Wentworth  Place  ring  in  my  ears.  Is  there  another  life?  Shall 
I  awake  and  find  all  this  a  dream?  There  must  be,  we  cannot 
be  created  for  this  sort  of  suffering. 

That  night,  (September  28)  adds  Keats,  they  expected 
to  put  into  Portland  Roads;  but  calms  again  held 
them  up,  and  again  they  were  allowed  to  land,  having 
made  only  some  few  miles'  headway  down  the  Dorset- 
shire coast.  The  day  of  this  landing  was  for  Keats  one 
of  transitory  calm  and  lightening  of  the  spirit.  The 
weather  was  fine,  and  ^for  a  moment,'  says  Severn,  'he 
became  like  his  former  self.  He  was  in  a  part  that  he 
already  knew,  and  showed  me  the  splendid  caverns  and 
grottoes  with  a  poet's  pride,  as  though  they  had  been 
his  birthright.'  These  are  vivid  phrases,  that  about 
the  caverns  and  grottoes  certainly  a  little  over-coloured 
for  the  scene,  which  was  Lulworth  Cove  and  the  remark- 
able, but  scarcely  splendid,  rock  tunnels  and  fissures  of 
Stair  Hole  and  Durdle  Door.  When  Severn  says  that 
Keats  knew  the  groimd,  one  haK  wonders  whether  the 
Dorsetshire  Keatses  may  really  have  been  kindred  of 
his  to  whom  he  had  at  some  time  paid  an  unrecorded 
visit:  or  otherwise,  whether  in  travelling  to  and  from 
Teignmouth  in  1818,  taking,  as  we  know  he  did,  the 
southern  route  from  Salisbury  by  Bridport  and  Axminster, 
he  may  have  broken  the  journey  at  Dorchester  and 
visited  the  curiosities  of  the  coast.  But  in  truth,  to 
understand  and  possess  beauties  of  nature  as  a  birth- 
right, Keats  needed  not  to  have  seen  them  before.  On 
board  ship  the  same  night  Keats  borrowed  the  copy 
of  Shakespeare's  Poems  which  he  had  given  Severn  a 
few  days  before,  and  wrote  out  fair  and  neatly  for 
him,  on  the  blank  page  opposite  the  heading  A  Lover^s 


THE  'BRIGHT  STAR'  SONNETS  493 

Complaint,  the  beautifiil  sonnet  which  every  lover  of 
EngHsh  knows  so  well: — 

Bright  star,  would  I  were  stedfast  as  thou  art. 

Not  in  lone  splendour  hung  aloft  the  night 
And  watching,  with  eternal  lids  apart. 

Like  nature's  patient,  sleepless  Eremite, 
The  moving  waters  at  their  priestlike  task 

Of  pure  ablution  round  earth's  human  shores. 
Or  gazing  on  the  new  soft-fallen  mask 

Of  snow  upon  the  mountains  and  the  moors — 
No — ^yet  still  stedfast,  still  unchangeable, 

Pillow'd  upon  my  fair  love's  ripening  breast. 
To  feel  for  ever  its  soft  fall  and  swell. 

Awake  for  ever  in  a  sweet  unrest, 
Still,  still  to  hear  her  tender-taken  breath. 
And  so  live  ever — or  else  swoon  to  death. 

Severn  in  later  life  clearly  cherished  the  impression 
that  the  sonnet  had  been  actually  composed  for  him 
on  the  day  of  the  Dorsetshire  landing.  Lord  Houghton 
in  his  Life  and  Literary  Remains  distinctly  asserts  as 
much,  and  it  had  seemed  to  us  all  a  beautiful  and  con- 
solatory circumstance,  in  the  tragedy  of  Keats's  closing 
days,  that  his  last  inspiration  in  poetry  should  have 
come  in  a  strain  of  such  unfevered  beauty  and  tender- 
ness, and  with  images  of  such  a  refreshing  and  solemn 
purity.  But  in  point  of  fact  the  sonnet  was  work  of 
an  earlier  date,  and  the  autograph  given  to  Severn  is 
on  the  face  of  it  no  draught  but  a  fair  copy.  Its  original 
form  had  been  this — 

Bright  star !  would  I  were  stedfast  as  thou  art  I 

Not  in  lone  splendour  hung  amid  the  night; 
Not  watching,  with  eternal  lids  apart. 

Like  Nature's  devout  sleepless  Eremite, 
The  morning  waters  at  their  priestHke  task 

Of  pure  ablution  round  earth's  human  shores; 
Or,  gazing  on  the  new  soft  fallen  mask 

Of  snow  upon  the  mountains  and  the  moors: — 
No; — yet  still  steadfast,  still  unchangeable, 

Cheek-pillow'd  on  my  Love's  white  ripening  breast. 
To  touch,  for  ever,  its  warm  sink  and  swell. 

Awake,  for  ever,  in  a  sweet  unrest; 


494  THE  VOYAGE  RESUMED 

To  hear,  to  feel  her  tender-taken  breath, 
Half  passionless,  and  so  swoon  on  to  death. 

The  sonnet  is  copied  in  this  form  by  Charles  Brown, 
under  date  1819,  in  the  collection  of  transcripts  from 
Keats's  fugitive  verses  which  from  the  spring  of  that 
year  he  regularly  made  as  soon  after  they  were  written 
as  he  could  lay  hands  on  them.  His  dates  I  have  found 
always  trustworthy,  and  I  have  shown  reason  (above, 
p.  334)  for  holding  the  sonnet  to  have  been  written  in 
the  last  week  of  February  1819,  and  the  j&rst  days  of 
Keats^s  engagement  to  Fanny  Brawne.  All  that  Keats 
can  actually  have  done  during  that  evening  of  tran- 
quillity off  Lulworth  was  to  return  to  it  in  thought  and 
recopy  it  for  Severn  with  changes  which  in  the  second 
line  heightened  the  remoteness  of  the  star;  in  the 
fourth  made  an  inverted  metrical  stress  normal  by  substi- 
tuting 'patient'  for  'devout';  in  the  fifth  changed 
the  word  'morning'  into  'moving,'  ^  in  the  tenth 
cancelled  one  of  his  defining  and  arresting  compound 
participles  in  favour  of  a  simpler  phrase;  and  in  the 
four  concluding  lines  varied  a  little  the  mood  and  tem- 
perature of  the  longing  expressed,  ^calling  for  death  not 
as  the  sequel  to  his  desire's  longing's  fulfilment,  but  as 
the  alternative  for  it./  In  Severn's  first  mention  of  the 
subject,  which  is  in'^  letter  written  from  Rome  a  few 
weeks  after  Keats's  death,  he  shows  himself  aware  that 
Brown  might  be  in  possession  already  of  a  version  of 
the  sonnet,  which  of  course  could  only  have  been  the 
case  if  it  had  been  composed  before  Keats  left  Hamp- 
stead.  '  Do  you  know,'  he  writes,  '  the  sonnet  beginning 
Bright  Star  etc.,  he  wrote  this  down  in  the  ship — it  is 
one  of  his  most  beautiful  things.  I  will  send  it,  if  you 
have  it  not.' 

The  rest  of  the  voyage,  after  getting  clear  of  the 
English  Channel,  was  quick  but  uncomfortable,  the 
weather  variable  and  often  squally.     Signs  of  improve- 

1  Unless  Brown  had  transcribed  'morning'  for  'moving'  in  error;  and 
this  was  probably  the  case,  though  there  is  a  tempting  sonority  in  the 
juxtaposition  of  the  nearly  identical  broad  vowel  sounds  in  his  version. 


A  MEDITATED  POEM  495 

ment  in  Keats's  health  alternated  with  alarming  returns 
of  haemorrhage,  and  the  painful  symptoms  of  his  fellow- 
traveller  Miss  Cotterell  preyed  sometimes  severely  on 
his  nerves  and  spirits.  At  other  times  his  thoughts 
ran  pleasantly  on  poems  yet  to  be  written,  and  especially 
on  one  he  had  planned  on  the  story  of  Sabrina.  /He 
mentioned  to  me  many  times  in  our  voyage',  writes 
Severn  within  a  few  weeks  of  the  poet's  death,  'his 
desire  to  write  this  story  and  to  connect  it  with  some 
points  in  the  English  history  and  character.  He  would 
sometimes  brood  over  it  with  immense  enthusiasm,  and 
recite  the  story  from  Milton's  Comus  in  a  manner  that 
I  will  remember  to  the  end  of  my  days.'  It  is  good  to 
think  of  Keats  being  thus  able  to  occupy  and  soothe 
his  fevered  spirit  with  the  lovely  cadences  that  tell  how 
Nereus  pitied  the  rescued  nymph, 

And  gave  her  to  his  daughters  to  imbathe 
In  nectar*d  layers  strew'd  with  Asphodel, 

or  with  those  that  invoke  her  in  the  prayer, — 

Listen  where  thou  art  sitting 
Under  the  glassie,  cool,  translucent  wave. 

In  twisted  braids  of  lilies  knitting 
The  loose  train  of  thy  amber-dropping  hair, — 

it  is  good  to  think  of  this  and  to  try  and  conceive  what 
Keats  while  he  was  in  health  might  have  made  of  this 
English  theme  which  haimted  his  imagination  now  and 
afterwards  at  Rome,  when  the  power  to  shape  and 
almost  the  power  to  live  and  breathe  had  left  him. 

Severn  took  during  the  voyage  an  opportunity  to 
make  a  new  drawing  of  Keats  as  he  lay  propped  and 
resting  on  his  berth.  Such  a  drawing  would  have  been 
an  invaluable  addition  to  our  memorials  of  the  poet: 
it  remained  long  in  the  possession  first  of  one  and  then 
of  another  of  Severn's  sons,  but  has  of  late  years  un- 
luckily disappeared:  stolen,  thinks  its  latest  owner, 
Mr  Arthur  Severn:  let  us  hope  that  this  mention  may 
perhaps  lead  to  its  recognition  and  recovery.  During 
some  rough  weather  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay  Keats  began 


496  INCIDENTS  AT  SEA 

to  reaxl  the  shipwreck  canto  of  Don  Juan,  but  presently 
found  its  reckless  and  cynic  brilliancy  intolerable,  and 
flung  the  volume  from  him  in  disgust.  Perhaps  some- 
thing of  his  real  feelings,  but  certainly  nothing  of  his 
way  of  expressing  them,  is  preserved  in  Severn's  account 
of  the  matter  written  five-and-twenty  years  later: — 

Keats  threw  down  the  book  and  exclaimed:  *this  gives  me 
the  most  horrid  idea  of  human  nature,  that  a  man  Hke  Byron 
should  have  exhausted  all  the  pleasures  of  the  world  so  completely 
that  there  was  nothing  left  for  him  but  to  laugh  and  gloat  over 
the  most  solemn  and  heart-rending  scenes  of  human  misery,  this 
storm  of  his  is  one  of  the  most  diabolical  attempts  ever  made 
upon  our  sympathies,  and  I  have  no  doubt  it  will  fascinate 
thousands  into  extreme  obduracy  of  heart — the  tendency  of 
Byron's  poetry  is  based  on  a  paltry  originality,  that  of  being 
new  by  making  solemn  things  gay  and  gay  things  solemn.' 

In  a  calm  off  Cape  St  Vincent,  Keats  was  delighted 
with  the  play  of  silken  colours  on  the  sea,  and  inter- 
ested in  watching  the  movement  of  a  whale.  The  next 
day  there  came  an  alarm:  a  shot  was  fired  over  the 
bows  of  the  'Maria  Crowther'  from  one  of  two  Portu- 
guese men  of  war  becalmed  close  by;  but  drifting 
within  hail  one  of  the  Portuguese  captains  explained 
that  there  were  supposed  to  be  privateers  in  those 
waters  and  that  he  only  wanted  to  learn  whether  the 
Englishman  had  sighted  any  such. 

On  October  21,  thirty-four  days  out  from  London, 
the  'Maria  Crowther'  reached  Naples  harbour  and  was 
promptly  put  in  quarantine.  In  that  predicament  her 
passengers  sweltered  and  fumed  for  ten  full  days,  their 
nimiber  having  been  increased  by  the  addition  of  a 
lieutenant  and  six  seamen,  who  were  despatched  from 
an  English  man-of-war  in  the  harbour  to  enquire  as 
to  the  vessel's  name  and  status,  and  having  thoughtlessly 
gone  on  board  her  were  forbidden  by  the  port  authorities 
to  go  off  again.  The  friends  found  some  alleviation 
from  the  tedium  of  the  time  through  the  kindness  of 
Miss  CotterelFs  brother,  a  banker  in  Naples,  who  kept 
them  supplied  with  all  manner  of  dainties  and  luxuries. 


QUARANTINE  AT  NAPLES  497 

and  especially  with  abundance  of  fruit  and  flowers. 
^  Keats  ^  says  Severn,  ^was  never  tired  of  admiring 
(not  to  speak  of  eating)  the  beautiful  clusters  of  grapes 
and  other  fruits,  and  was  scarce  less  enthusiastic  over 
the  autumn  flowers,  though  I  remember  his  saying  once 
that  he  would  gladly  give  them  all  for  a  wayside  dog- 
rose  bush  covered  with  pink  blooms.'  The  time  of 
detention  passed  with  a  good  deal  of  merriment,  songs 
from  the  man-of-war's  men  on  board,  songs,  laughter, 
and  gibes  from  the  Neapolitan  boatmen  swarming  round. 
In  aU  this  Keats  would  join,  feverishly  enough  it  is 
evident,  and  declared  afterwards  that  he  had  made 
more  puns  in  the  course  of  those  ten  days  than  in  any 
whole  year  of  his  life  beside.  Once  he  flashed  into  a 
characteristic  heat  of  righteous  wrath,  when  the  seamen 
took  to  trolling  obscene  catches  in  full  hearing  of  the 
ladies.  On  the  fourth  day  of  their  detention  he  wrote 
to  Mrs  Brawne  (to  Fanny  he  dared  not  write,  nor  suffer 
his  thoughts  to  dwell  on  her  at  all),  saying  what  he 
thought  of  his  own  state: — 


We  have  to  remain  in  the  vessel  ten  days  and  are  at  present 
shut  in  a  tier  of  ships.  The  sea  air  has  been  beneficial  to  me 
about  to  as  great  extent  as  squally  weather  and  bad  accommoda- 
tions and  provisions  has  done  harm.  So  I  am  about  as  I  was. 
Give  my  love  to  Fanny  and  tell  her,  if  I  were  well  there  is  enough 
in  this  Port  of  Naples  to  fill  a  quire  of  Paper — but  it  looks  like 
a  dream — every  man  who  can  row  his  boat  and  walk  and  talk 
seems  a  different  being  from  myself.     I  do  not  feel  in  the  world. 

It  is  impossible  to  describe  exactly  in  what  state  of  health  I 
am — at  this  moment  I  am  suffering  from  indigestion  very  much, 
which  makes  such  stuff  of  this  Letter.  I  would  always  wish  you 
to  think  me  a  little  worse  than  I  really  am ;  not  being  of  a  sanguine 
disposition  I  am  likely  to  succeed.  If  I  do  not  recover  your  regret 
will  be  softened — if  I  do  your  pleasure  will  be  doubled.  I  dare 
not  fix  my  Mind  upon  Fanny,  I  have  not  dared  to  think  of  her. 
The  only  comfort  I  have  had  that  way  has  been  in  thinking  for 
hours  together  of  having  the  knife  she  gave  me  put  in  a  silver- 
case — the  hair  in  a  Locket — and  the  Pocket  Book  in  a  gold  net. 
Show  her  this.  I  dare  say  no  more.  Yet  you  must  not  believe 
I  am  so  ill  as  this  Letter  may  look,  for  if  ever  there  was  a  person 
bom  without  the  faculty  of  hoping  I  am  he.     Severn  is  writing 


498      LETTERS  FROM  KEATS  AND  HASLAM 

to  Haslam,  and  I  have  just  asked  him  to  request  Haslam  to  send 
you  his  account  of  my  health.  O  what  an  account  I  could  give 
you  of  the  Bay  of  Naples  if  I  could  once  more  feel  myself  a 
Citizen  of  this  world — I  feel  a  spirit  in  my  Brain  would  lay  it 
forth  pleasantly — O  what  a  misery  it  is  to  have  an  intellect  in 
splints ! 

Once  released  from  quarantine  and  landed  at  Naples 
Severn  wrote  to  Haslam  fully  his  impressions  of  the 
voyage  and  of  its  effects  on  his  friend. 

Naples,  Nov.  1  1820. 
My  dear  Haslam, 

We  are  just  released  from  the  loathsome  misery  of  quaran- 
tine— foul  weather  and  foul  air  for  the  whole  10  days  kept  us  to 
the  small  cabin — surrounded  by  about  2,000  ships  in  a  wretched 
hole  not  sufficient  for  half  the  number,  yet  Keats  is  still  living — 
may  I  not  have  hopes  of  him  ?  He  has  passed  what  I  must  have 
thought  would  kill  myself.  Now  that  we  are  on  shore  and  feel 
the  fresh  air,  I  am  horror  struck  at  his  sufferings  on  this  voyage, 
all  that  could  be  fatal  to  him  in  air  and  diet — with  the  want  of 
medicine  and  conveniences  he  has  weather'd  it,  if  I  may  call  his 
poor  shattered  frame  and  broken  heart  weathering  it.  For  myself 
I  have  stood  it  firmly  until  this  morning  when  in  a  moment  my 
spirits  dropt  at  the  sight  of  his  suffering — a  plentiful  shower  of 
tears  (which  he  did  not  see)  has  relieved  me  somewhat — what  he 
passed  still  unnerves  me.  But  now  we  are  breathing  in  a  large 
room  with  Vesuvius  in  our  view — Keats  has  become  calm  and 
thinks  favourably  of  this  place  for  we  are  meeting  with  much 
kind  treatment  on  every  side — ^more  particularly  from  an  English 
gentleman  here  (brother  to  Miss  Cottrell  one  of  our  lady  passen- 
gers) who  has  shown  unusually  humane  treatment  to  Keats — 
unasked — these  with  very  good  accommodation  at  our  Inn 
(Villa  de  Londra)  have  kept  him  up  through  dinner — but  on  the 
other  hand  Dr  Milner  is  at  Rome  (whither  Keats  is  proposing  to 
go)  the  weather  is  now  cold  wet  and  foggy,  and  we  find  ourselves 
on  the  wrong  side  for  his  hope  for  recovery  (for  the  present  I 
will  talk  to  him — he  is  disposed  to  it.  I  will  talk  him  to  sleep 
for  he  has  suffered  much  fatigue). 

Nov.  2. 

Keats  went  to  bed  much  recovered — I  took  every  means  to 
remove  from  him  a  heavy  grief  that  may  tend  more  than  anything 
to  be  fatal — he  told  me  much — very  much — and  I  don't  know 
whether  it  was  more  painful  for  me  or  himself — but  it  had  the 
effect  of  much  relieving  him — he  went  very  calm  to  bed. 


LADY  PASSENGERS   DESCRIBED         499 

Poor  fellow !  he  is  still  sleeping  at  half  past  nine,  if  I  can  but 
ease  his  mind  I  will  bring  him  back  to  England  well — but  I  fear 
it  never  can  be  done  in  this  world — the  grand  scenery  here  affects 
him  a  little — but  he  is  too  infirm  to  enjoy  it — his  gloom  deadens 
his  sight  to  everything — and  but  for  intervals  of  something  like 
ease  he  must  soon  end  it — 

You  will  like  to  know  how  I  have  managed  in  respect  to  self. 
I  have  had  a  most  severe  task  full  of  contrarieties  what  I  did  one 
way  was  undone  another.  The  lady  passenger  though  in  the 
same  state  as  Keats — yet  differing  in  constitution  required 
almost  everything  the  opposite  to  him — ^for  instance  if  the  cabin 
windows  were  not  open  she  would  faint  and  remain  entirely 
insensible  5  or  6  hours  together — if  the  windows  were  open  poor 
Keats  would  be  taken  with  a  cough  (a  violent  one — caught  from 
this  cause)  and  sometimes  spitting  of  blood,  now  I  had  this  to 
manage  continually  for  our  other  passenger  is  a  most  consumate 
brute — she  would  see  Miss  Cottrell  stiffened  like  a  corpse — I 
have  sometimes  thought  her  dead — nor  ever  lend  the  least  aid- 
full  a  dozen  times  I  have  recovered  this  lady  and  put  her  to  bed 
— sometimes  she  would  faint  4  times  in  a  day  yet  at  intervals 
would  seem  quite  well — and  was  full  of  spirits — she  is  both  young 
and  lively — and  but  for  her  we  should  have  had  more  heaviness 
— though  much  less  trouble.  She  has  benefited  by  Keats's 
advice — ^I  used  to  act  under  him — and  reduced  the  fainting  each 
time — she  has  recovered  very  much  and  gratefully  ascribes  it 
to  us — ^her  brother  the  same. 

The  Captain  has  behaved  with  great  kindness  to  us  all — ^but 
more  particularly  Keats — everything  that  could  be  got  or  done — 
was  at  his  service  without  asking — ^he  is  a  good-natured  man  to 
his  own  injury — strange  for  a  captain  I  won't  say  so  much  for  his 
ship — it's  a  bkck  hole — 5  sleeping  in  one  cabin — the  one  you 
saw — the  only  one — during  the  voyage  I  have  been  frequently 
sea-sick — sometimes  severely — 2  days  together.  We  have  had 
only  one  real  fright  on  the  seas — ^not  to  mention  continued 
squalls — and  a  storm.  'All's  well  that  ends  well,'  and  these 
ended  well.  Our  fright  was  from  two  Portugese  ships  of  war — 
they  brought  us  to  with  a  shot — ^which  passed  close  under  our 
stern — this  was  not  pleasant  for  us  you  will  allow — ^nor  was  it 
decreased  when  they  came  up — ^for  a  more  infernal  set  I  never 
could  imagine — after  some  trifling  questions  they  allowed  us  to 
go  on  to  our  no  small  delight — our  captain  was  afraid  they  would 
plunder  the  ship — this  was  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay — over  which  we 
were  carried  by  a  good  wind. 

Keats  has  written  to  Brown — and  in  quarantine  another  to 
Mrs  Brawne — he  requests  you  will  tell  Mrs  Brawne  what  I  think 


500  A  CRY  OF  AGONY 

of  him — ^for  he  is  too  bad  to  judge  of  himself — this  morning  he 
is  still  very  much  better.  We  are  in  good  spirits  and  I  may  say 
hopeful  fellows — at  least  I  may  say  as  much  for  Keats — ^he  made 
an  Italian  pun  to-day — the  rain  is  coming  down  in  torrents. 

The  confession  Keats  had  made  to  Severn  was  of 
course  that  of  the  effects  of  the  passion  which  had  so 
long  been  racking  and  wasting  him,  and  the  violence  of 
which  he  had  shrunk  till  now  from  disclosing  to  friend 
or  brother.  Writing  on  the  same  day  to  Brown,  he 
could  not  control  or  disguise  the  anguish  of  his  heart. 

Naples,  1  November  1820. 
My  dear  Brown, 

Yesterday  we  were  let  out  of  Quarantine,  during  which 
my  health  suffered  more  from  bad  air  and  the  stifled  cabin  than 
it  had  done  the  whole  voyage.  The  fresh  air  revived  me  a  little, 
and  I  hope  I  am  well  enough  this  morning  to  write  to  you  a  short 
calm  letter; — if  that  can  be  called  one,  in  which  I  am  afraid  to 
speak  of  what  I  would  fainest  dwell  upon.  As  I  have  gone  thus 
far  into  it,  I  must  go  on  a  little;  perhaps  it  may  relieve  the  load 
of  WRETCHEDNESS  which  prcsscs  upon  me.  The  persuasion 
that  I  will  see  her  no  more  will  kill  me.  My  dear  Brown,  I  should 
have  had  her  when  I  was  in  health,  and  I  should  have  remained 
well.  I  can  bear  to  die — I  cannot  bear  to  leave  her.  O  God! 
God!  God!  Everything  I  have  in  my  trunks  that  reminds  me 
of  her  goes  through  me  Uke  a  spear.  The  silk  lining  she  put  in 
my  travelling  cap  scalds  my  head.  My  imagination  is  horribly 
vivid  about  her — I  see  her — I  hear  her.  There  is  nothing  in  the 
world  of  sufficient  interest  to  divert  me  from  her  a  moment. 
This  was  the  case  when  I  was  in  England;  I  cannot  recollect, 
without  shuddering,  the  time  that  I  was  a  prisoner  at  Hunt's, 
and  used  to  keep  my  eyes  fixed  on  Hampstead  all  day.  Then 
there  was  a  good  hope  of  seeing  her  again — Now! — O  that  I 
could  be  buried  near  where  she  lives !  I  am  afraid  to  write  to  her 
— to  receive  a  letter  from  her — to  see  her  handwriting  would 
break  my  heart — even  to  hear  of  her  anyhow,  to  see  her  name 
written,  would  be  more  than  I  can  bear.  My  dear  Brown,  what 
am  I  to  do?    Where  can  I  look  for  consolation  or  ease? 

I  cannot  say  a  word  about  Naples;  I  do  not  feel  at  all  con- 
cerned in  the  thousand  novelties  around  me.  I  am  afraid  to 
write  to  her — I  should  like  her  to  know  that  I  do  not  forget  her. 
Oh,  Brown,  I  have  coals  of  fire  in  my  breast.  It  surprises  me 
that  the  human  heart  is  capable  of  containing  and  bearing  so 
much  misery.    Was  I  bom  for  this  end?    God  bless  her,  and 


NEAPOLITAN  IMPRESSIONS  501 

her  mother,  and  my  sister,  and  George,  and  his  wife,  and  you, 
and  all ! 

During  the  four  days  they  remained  at  Naples  Keats 
received  a  second  invitation  in  the  kindest  possible 
terms  from  Shelley  to  come  and  settle  near  him  in  Pisa, 
but  determined  to  carry  out  his  original  plan  of  winter- 
ing at  Rome,  where  a  credit  has  been  opened  for  him 
at  Torlonia's  and  whither  he  was  bringing  a  special 
introduction  to  Dr  (afterwards  Sir  James)  Clark.  Severn 
was  also  the  bearer  of  one  from  Sir  Thomas  Lawrence 
to  Canova.  Keats  attempted  to  amuse  himself  reading 
Clarissa  Harlowe,  and  also  seeing  some  of  the  sights  of 
Naples.  After  almost  a  century  there  has  lately  come 
to  light  a  record,  set  down  at  second-hand  and  probably 
touched  up  in  the  telling,  of  some  things  noticed  and 
words  spoken  by  the  stricken  poet  in  drives  about  the 
city  and  suburbs  ia  the  friendly  company  of  Mr  Charles 
CottereU,  the  brother  of  his  invalid  fellow-passenger. 
Keats  was  driving,  says  the  narrator,  Mr  Charles 
Macfarlane, — 

— ^he  was  driving  with  Charles  Cottrell  from  the  Bourbon 
Museum,  up  the  beautiful  open  road  which  leads  up  to  Capo  di 
Monte  and  the  Ponte  Rossi.  On  the  way,  in  front  of  a  villa  or 
cottage,  he  was  struck  and  moved  by  the  sight  of  some  rose  trees 
in  full  bearing.  Thinking  to  gratify  the  invalid,  Cottrell,  a 
ci-devant  officer  in  the  British  Navy,  jumped  out  of  the  carriage, 
spoke  to  somebody  about  the  house  or  garden,  and  was  back  in 
a  trice  with  a  bouquet  of  roses.  'How  late  in  the  year!  What 
an  exquisite  climate!'  said  the  Poet;  but  on  putting  them  to 
his  nose,  he  threw  the  flowers  down  on  the  opposite  seat,  and 
exclaimed:  'Humbugs!  they  have  no  scent!-  What  is  a  rose 
without  its  fragrance?  I  hate  and  abhor  all  humbug,  whether 
in  a  flower  or  in  a  man  or  woman!'  And  having  worked 
himself  strongly  up  in  the  anti-humbug  humour,  he  cast  the 
bouquet  out  on  the  road.  I  suppose  that  the  flowers  were 
China  roses,  which  have  little  odour  at  any  time,  and  hardly 
any  at  the  approach  of  winter. 

Returning  from  that  drive,  he  had  intense  enjoyment  in 
halting  close  to  the  Capuan  Gate,  and  in  watching  a  group  of 
lazzaroni  or  labouring  men,  as,  at  a  stall  with  fire  and  cauldron 
by   the  roadside  in   the  open  air,   they  were  disposing  of  an 


502  ON  THE  ROAD  TO  ROME 

incredible  quantity  of  macaroni,  introducing  it  in  long  unbroken 
strings  into  their  capacious  mouths,  without  the  intermediary 
of  anything  but  their  hands.  *I  like  this,'  said  he;  'these 
hearty  fellows  scorn  the  humbug  of  knives  and  forks.  Fingers 
were  invented  first.  Give  them  some  carlini  that  they  may  eat 
more  I     Glorious  sight !     How  they  take  it  in ! '  ^ 

But  the  political  state  and  servile  temper  of  the 
Neapolitan  people — though  they  were  living  just  then 
under  the  constitutional  forms  imposed  on  the  Bourbon 
monarchy  by  the  revolution  of  the  previous  summer — 
grated  on  Keats's  liberal  instincts,  and  misinterpret- 
ing at  the  theatre  the  sight  of  a  couple  of  armed 
sentries  posted  (as  was  the  custom  of  the  time  and 
coimtry)  on  the  stage,  he  broke  into  a  fit  of  anger  and 
determined  suddenly  to  leave  the  place.  Accordingly 
on  the  4th  or  5th  of  November  the  friends  set  out 
for  Rome  in  a  small  hired  carriage,  which  jogged  so 
loiteringly  on  the  road  that  Severn  was  able  to  walk 
beside  it  almost  all  the  way.  Keats  suffered  seriously 
at  the  stoppiag-places  from  bad  quarters  and  bad  food, 
and  was  for  the  most  part  listless  and  dispirited,  but 
would  become  animated  ^  when  an  unusually  fine  prospect 
opened  before  us,  or  the  breeze  bore  to  us  exquisite 
hill  fragrances  or  breaths  from  the  distant  blue  seas, 
and  particularly  when  I  Hterally  filled  the  little  carriage 
with  flowers.  He  never  tired  of  these,  and  they  gave 
him  a  singular  and  almost  fantastic  pleasure  which  was 
at  times  almost  akin  to  a  strange  joy.'  Entering  Rome 
by  the  Lateran  gate  they  settle  at  once  in  lodgings 
which   Dr   Clark,   to   whom   Keats  had   written  from 

^  Reminiscences  of  a  Literary  Life,  by  Charles  Macfarlane:  London,  John 
Murray,  1917,  pp.  12-15. — Keats  in  his  letters  is  apt  enough  to  talk  of  cant 
and  flummery,  but  not  of  humbug,  and  I  suspect  the  word,  though  not 
the  thought,  is  put  into  his  mouth.  With  reference  to  Mr  Macfarlane's 
account  of  Keats  generally  as  'one  of  the  most  cheery  and  plucky  little 
fellows  I  ever  knew,'  and  as  a  man  to  have  stood  with  composure  a  whole 
broadside  of  Blackwood  and  Quarterly  articles,  and  to  have  faced  a 
battery  by  the  side  of  any  friend,  it  is  difficult  to  conjecture  at  what  date 
the  writer  can  have  seen  enough  of  Keats  to  form  these  impressions. 
From  January  1816,  when  he  was  in  his  seventeenth  year,  to  1827,  yoimg 
Macfarlane  seems  to  have  lived  entirely  at  Naples,  except  for  some 
excursions  to  the  Levant  and  a  short  visit  to  England  in  1820,  when 
Keats  was  a  consumptive  patient  already  starting  or  started  for  Italy. 


LIFE  AT  ROME  503 

Naples,  had  already  secured  for  them,  in  the  first  house 
on  the  right  going  up  the  steps  from  the  Piazza  di 
Spagna  to  Sta  Trinita  dei  Monti.  Here,  according  to 
the  manner  of  those  days  in  Italy,  they  were  left  pretty 
much  to  shift  for  themselves.  Neither  could  speak 
ItaHan,  and  at  first  they  were  iU  served  by  the  trattoria 
from  which  they  got  their  meals,  until  Keats,  having 
bidden  Severn  see  how  he  would  mend  matters,  one 
day  coolly  emptied  all  the  dishes  out  of  the  window, 
and  handed  them  back  to  the  porter:  a  hint,  says 
Severn,  which  was  quickly  taken.  For  a  while  the 
patient  seemed  better.  Dr  Clark  wished  him  to  avoid 
the  excitement  of  seeing  the  famous  monuments  of  the 
city,  so  he  left  Severn  to  visit  these  alone,  and  con- 
tented himself  with  quiet  stroUs,  chiefly  on  the  Pincian 
close  by. 

The  season  was  fine,  and  the  freshness  and  bright- 
ness of  the  air,  says  Severn,  invariably  made  him  pleasant 
and  witty.  Clark  gave  Severn  an  introduction  to  Gibson, 
the  then  famous  American  sculptor,  and  Keats  insisted 
on  his  delivering  it  at  once  and  losing  no  opportunity 
of  making  acquaintances  in  Rome  that  might  be  useful 
to  him,  and  no  time  in  getting  to  work  on  his  projected 
competition  picture,  'The  Death  of  Alcibiades.'  In 
Severn's  absence  Keats  had  a  companion  he  Hked  in 
an  invahd  Lieutenant  Elton.  In  their  walks  on  the 
Pincian  these  two  often  met  the  famous  beauty  Pauline 
Bonaparte,  Princess  Borghese.  Her  charms  were  by 
this  time  failing — ^but  not  for  lack  of  exercise;  and  her 
melting  glances  at  his  companion,  who  was  tall  and 
handsome,  presently  affected  Keats's  nerves,  and  made 
them  change  the  direction  of  their  walks.  Sometimes, 
instead  of  walking,  they  would  take  short  invalid  rides, 
on  hired  mounts  suited  to  their  respective  statures, 
about  the  Pincian  or  outside  the  Porta  del  Popolo, 
while  Severn  was  working  among  the  ruins. 

The  mitigation  of  Keats's  sufferings  lasted  for  some 
five  weeks,  and  filled  the  anxious  heart  of  Severn  with 
hope.    Nevertheless  he  could  not  but  be  aware  of  the 


504  APPARENT  IMPROVEMENT 

deep-seated  dejection  in  his  friend  which  found  ex- 
pression now  and  again  in  word  or  act,  as  when  he  began 
reading  a  volume  of  Alfieri,  but  dropped  it  at  the  lines, 
too  sacQy  applicable  to  himself: —  ^ 

Misera  me !  sollievo  a  me  non  resta 
Altro  che  '1  pianto,  ed  il  pianto  e  delitto. 

Notwithstanding  signs  like  this,  his  mood  was  on  the 
whole  more  placid.  Severn  had  hired  a  piano  for  their 
lodgings,  and  the  patient  often  allowed  himself  to  be 
soothed  with  music.  His  thoughts  even  turned  towards 
verse,  and  he  again  meditated  and  spoke  of  his  pro- 
posed poem  on  the  subject  of  Sabrina.  Severn  began 
to  beheve  he  would  get  well,  and  on  November  30  Keats 
himself  wrote  to  Brown  in  a  strain  far  from  cheerful, 
indeed,  but  much  less  desperate  than  before. 

I  have  an  habitual  feeling  of  my  real  life  having  passed,  and 
that  I  am  leading  a  posthumous  existence.  God  knows  how  it 
would  have  been — but  it  appears  to  me — however,  I  will  not 
speak  of  that  subject.  I  must  have  been  at  Bedhampton  nearly 
at  the  time  you  were  writing  to  me  from  Chichester — ^how  un- 
fortunate— and  to  pass  on  the  river  too!  There  was  my  star 
predominant!  I  cannot  answer  anything  in  your  letter,  which 
followed  me  from  Naples  to  Rome,  because  I  am  afraid  to  look 
it  over  again.  I  am  so  weak  (in  mind)  that  I  cannot  bear  the 
sight  of  any  handwriting  of  a  friend  I  love  so  much  as  I  do  you. 
Yet  I  ride  the  little  horse,  and,  at  my  worst,  even  in  quarantine, 
summoned  up  more  puns,  in  a  sort  of  desperation,  in  one  week 
than  in  any  year  of  my  life.  There  is  one  thought  enough  to  kill 
me;  I  have  been  well,  healthy,  alert,  etc.,  walking  with  her, 
and  now  the  knowledge  of  contrast,  feeling  for  light  and  shade, 
all  that  information  (primitive  sense)  necessary  for  a  poem,  are 
great  enemies  to  the  recovery  of  the  stomach.  There,  you  rogue, 
I  put  you  to  the  torture;  but  you  must  bring  your  philosophy  to 
bear,  as  I  do  mine,  really,  or  how  should  I  be  able  to  live?  Dr 
Clark  is  very  attentive  to  me;  he  says  there  is  very  little'  the 
matter  with  my  lungs,  but  my  stomach,  he  says,  is  very  bad. 
I  am  well  disappointed  in  hearing  good  news  from  George,  for 
it  runs  in  my  head  we  shall  all  die  young.  I  have  not  written  to 
Reynolds  yet,  which  he  must  think  neglectful;  being  anxious 
to  send  him  a  good  account  of  my  health,  I  have  delayed  it  from 
week  to  week.     If  I  recover,  I  will  do  all  in  my  power  to  correct 


RELAPSE  AND  DESPAIR  505 

the  mistakes  made  during  sickness;  and  if  I  should  not,  all  my 
faults  will  be  forgiven.  Severn  is  very  well,  though  he  leads  so 
dull  a  life  with  me.  Remember  me  to  all  friends,  and  tell  Haslam 
I  should  not  have  left  London  without  taking  leave  of  him,  but 
from  being  so  low  in  body  and  mind.  Write  to  George  as  soon 
as  you  receive  this,  and  tell  him  how  I  am,  as  far  as  you  can 
guess;  and  also  a  note  to  my  sister — ^who  walks  about  my 
imagination  like  a  ghost — she  is  so  like  Tom.  I  can  scarcely 
bid  you  good-bye,  even  in  a  letter.  I  always  make  an  awkward 
bow. 

God  bless  you ! 

But  on  the  glimmering  hopes  of  these  first  weeks  at 
Rome  there  suddenly  followed  despair.  On  Dec.  10, 
'when  he  was  going  on  in  good  spirits,  quite  merrily/ 
says  Severn,  came  a  relapse  which  left  no  doubt  of  the 
issue.  Haemorrhage  followed  haemorrhage  on  success- 
sive  days,  and  then  came  a  period  of  violent  fever,  with 
scenes  the  most  piteous  and  distressing.  To  put  an 
end  to  his  misery,  Keats  with  agonies  of  entreaty  begged 
to  have  the  bottle  of  laudanum  which  Severn  had  by 
his  desire  bought  at  Gravesend:  and  on  Severn^s  refusal, 
'his  tender  appeal  turned  to  despair,  with  all  the  power 
of  his  ardent  imagination  and  bursting  heart.'  It  was 
no  unmanly  fear  of  pain  in  Keats,  Severn  again  and 
again  insists,  that  prompted  this  appeal,  but  above  all 
his  acute  S3nnpathetic  sense  of  the  trials  which  the  sequel 
would  bring  upon  his  friend.  'He  explained  to  me  the 
exact  procediu-e  of  his  gradual  dissolution,  enumerated 
my  deprivations  and  toils,  and  dwelt  upon  the  danger 
to  my  Hfe  and  certainly  to  my  fortune  of  my  contiaued 
attendance  on  him.'  Severn  gently  holding  firm,  Keats 
for  a  while  fiercely  refused  his  friend's  ministrations, 
until  presently  the  example  of  that  friend's  patience 
and  his  own  better  mind  made  him  ashamed. 

From  these  relapses  imtil  the  end  Severn  had  no 
respite  from  his  devoted  ministrations.  Writing  to 
Mrs  Brawne  a  week  after  the  crisis,  he  says,  'Not  a 
moment  can  I  be  from  him.  I  sit  by  his  bed  and  read 
all  day,  and  at  night  I  humour  him  in  all  his  wanderings. 
He  has  just  fallen  asleep,  the  first  sleep  for  eight  nights, 


506  SEVERN^S  MINISTRATIONS 

and  now  from  mere  exhaustion/  By  degrees  the  tumult 
of  his  soul  abated.  His  sufferings  were  very  great, 
partly  from  the  nature  of  the  disease  itself,  partly  from 
the  effect  of  the  disastrous  lowering  and  starving  treat- 
ment at  that  day  employed  to  combat  it.  His  diet  was 
at  one  time  reduced  to  one  anchovy  and  a  small  piece 
of  toast  a  day,  so  that  he  endured  cruel  pangs  of  actual 
hunger.  Shunned  and  neglected  as  the  sick  and  their 
companions  then  were  in  Italy,  the  friends  had  no 
succour  except  from  the  assiduous  kindness  of  Dr  and 
Mrs  Clark,  with  occasional  aid  from  a  stranger,  Mr 
Ewing.  The  devotion  and  resource  of  Severn  were 
infinite,  and  had  their  reward.  Occasionally  there  came 
times  of  delirium  or  half-delirium,  when  the  dying  man 
would  rave  wildly  of  his  miseries  and  his  ruined  hopes, 
and  of  all  that  he  would  have  done  in  poetry  had  life 
and  the  fruition  of  his  love  been  granted  him,  till  his 
companion  was  almost  exhausted  with  ^beating  about 
in  the  tempest  of  his  mind';  and  once  and  again  some 
fresh  remembrance  of  his  betrothed,  or  the  sight  of 
her  handwriting  in  a  letter,  would  pierce  him  with  too 
intolerable  a  pang.  But  generally,  after  the  first  days 
of  storm,  he  lay  quiet,  with  his  hand  clasped  on  a  white 
cornelian,  one  of  the  little  tokens  she  had  given  him  at 
starting,  while  his  companion  soothed  him  with  reading 
or  music.  The  virulence  of  the  reviewers,  which  most 
of  his  friends  supposed  to  be  what  was  killing  him,  was 
a  matter,  Severn  declares,  scarcely  ever  on  his  lips  or 
in  his  mind  at  all.  Gradually  he  seemed  to  mend  and 
gather  a  little  strength  again,  tiU  Severn  actually  began 
to  dream  that  he  might  even  yet  recover,  though  he 
himself  would  admit  no  such  hope.  'He  says  the  con- 
tinued stretch  of  his  imagination  has  already  killed  him. 
He  will  not  hear  of  his  good  friends  in  England,  except 
for  what  they  have  done;  and  this  is  another  load; 
but  of  their  high  hopes  of  him,  his  certain  success,  his 
experience,  he  will  not  hear  a  word.  Then  the  want  of 
some  kind  of  hope  to  feed  his  voracious  imagination' — 
This  is  from  a  letter  to  Mr  Taylor  which  Severn  began 


HIS  LETTERS  FROM   THE  SICKROOM   507 

on  Christmas  Eve  and  never  finished.  On  the  11th 
January",  in  one  convejdng  to  Mrs  Brawne  the  reviving 
hopes  he  was  beginning  on  the  slenderest  grounds  to 
cherish,  Severn  writes : — 


Now  he  has  changed  to  calmness  and  quietude,  as  singular 
as  productive  of  good,  for  his  mind  was  most  certainly  killing 
him.  He  has  now  given  up  all  thoughts,  hopes,  or  even  wish  for 
recovery.  His  mind  is  in  a  state  of  peace  from  the  final  leave 
he  has  taken  of  this  world  and  all  its  future  hopes;  this  has 
been  an  immense  weight  for  him  to  rise  from.  He  remains  quiet 
and  submissive  under  his  heavy  fate.  Now,  if  anything  will 
recover  him,  it  is  this  absence  of  himself.  I  have  perceived  for 
the  last  three  days  symptoms  of  recovery.  Dr  Clark  even  thinks 
so.  Nature  again  revives  in  him — I  mean  where  art  was  used 
before;  yesterday  he  permitted  me  to  carry  him  from  his  bed- 
room to  our  sitting-room — to  put  clean  things  on  him — and  to 
talk  about  my  painting  to  him.  This  is  my  good  hews — don't 
think  it  otherwise,  my  dear  madam,  for  I  have  been  in  such  a 
state  of  anxiety  and  discomfiture  in  this  barbarous  place,  that 
the  least  hope  of  my  friend's  recovery  is  a  heaven  to  me. 

For  three  weeks  I  have  never  left  him — I  have  sat  up  all  night 
— I  have  read  to  him  nearly  all  day,  and  even  in  the  night — I 
light  the  fire — make  his  breakfast,  and  sometimes  am  obliged 
to  cook — make  his  bed,  and  even  sweep  the  room.  I  can  have 
these  things  done,  but  never  at  the  time  when  they  must  and 
ought  to  be  done — so  that  you  will  see  my  alternative;  what 
enrages  me  most  is  making  a  fire — I  blow — blow  for  an  hour — 
the  smoke  comes  fuming  out — my  kettle  falls  over  on  the  burning 
sticks — no  stove — Keats  calling  me  to  be  with  him — the  fire 
catching  my  hands  and  the  door-bell  ringing:  all  these  to  one 
quite  unused  and  not  at  all  capable — with  the  want  of  even 
proper  material — come  not  a  little  galling.  But  to  my  great 
surprise  I  am  not  ill — or  even  restless — nor  have  I  been  all  the 
time;  there  is  nothing  but  what  I  will  do  for  him — there  is  no 
alternative  but  what  I  think  and  provide  myself  against — except 
his  death — not  the  loss  of  him — I  am  prepared  to  bear  that — but 
the  inhumanity,  the  barbarism  of  these  Italians.  .  .  . 

O !  I  would  my  unfortunate  friend  had  never  left  your  Went- 
worth  Place — ^for  the  hopeless  advantages  of  this  comfortless 
Italy.  He  has  many,  many  times  talked  over  'the  few  happy 
days  at  your  house,  the  only  time  when  his  mind  was  at  ease.' 
I  hope  still  to  see  him  with  you  again.  Farewell,  my  dear  madam. 
One  more  thing  I  must  say — poor  Keats  cannot  see  any  letters, 
at  least  he  will  not — they  affect  him  so  much  and  increase  his 


508  THE  SAME  CONTINUED 

danger.     The  two  last  I  repented  giving,  he  made  me  put  them 
into  his  box — unread. 

The  complaint  about  the  barbarity  of  Rome  and  of 
Italian  law  was  due  to  a  warning  Severn  had  received 
that  on  the  death  of  his  friend  every  stick  and  shred  of 
furniture  in  the  house  would  have  to  be  burnt.  Within 
a  few  days  the  last  thread  of  hope  was  snapped  by  fresh 
retiu'ns  of  haemorrhage  and  utter  prostration,  with 
renewed  feverish  agitations  of  the  tortured  spirit. 
Writing  to  Haslam  on  January  the  15th,  Severn  shows 
himself  almost  broken  down  by  the  imminence  of  money 
difficulties  about  to  add  themselves  to  his  other  cares: — 

Poor  Keats  has  just  fallen  asleep — I  have  watched  him  and 
read  to  him — to  his  very  last  wink — he  has  been  saying  to  me 
'Severn  I  can  see  under  your  quiet  look — immense  twisting  and 
contending — ^you  don't  know  what  you  are  reading — ^you  are 
enduring  for  me  more  than  I'd  have  you — O  that  my  last  hour 
was  come — ^what  is  it  puzzles  you  now — ^what  is  it  happens — ' 
I  tell  him  that  'nothing  happens — nothing  worries  me  beyond 
his  seeing — that  it  has  been  the  dull  day.'  Getting  from  myself 
to  his  recovery — and  then  my  painting — and  then  England — 
and  then — but  they  are  all  lies — my  heart  almost  leaps  to  deny 
them — for  I  have  the  veriest  load  of  care — that  ever  came  upon 
these  shoulders  of  mine.  For  Keats  is  sinking  daily — perhaps 
another  three  weeks  may  lose  me  him  for  ever — this  alone  would 
break  down  the  most  gallant  spirit — I  had  made  sure  of  his 
recovery  when  I  set  out.  I  was  selfish  and  thought  of  his  value 
to  me — and  made  a  point  of  my  future  success  depend  on  his 
candor  to  me — this  is  not  all — I  have  prepared  myself  to  bear 
this  now — now  that  I  must  and  should  have  seen  it  before — 
but  Torlonias  the  bankers  have  refused  any  more  money — the 
bill  is  returned  unaccepted — 'no  effects'  and  I  tomorrow  must 
— aye  must — pay  the  last  solitary  crown  for  this  cursed  lodging 
place — ^yet  more  should  our  unfortunate  friend  die — all  the 
furniture  will  be  burnt — bed  sheets — curtains  and  even  the  walls 
must  be  scraped — and  these  devils  will  come  upon  me  for  £100 
or  £150 — the  making  good — but  above  all  this  noble  fellow 
lying  on  the  bed  is  dying  in  horror — no  kind  hope  smoothing 
down  his  suffering — no  philosophy — no  religion  to  support  him 
— yet  with  all  the  most  gnawing  desire  for  it — ^yet  without  the 
possibility  of  receiving  it.  .  .  . 

Now  Haslam  what  do  you  think  of  my  situation — ^for  I  know 


TRANQUIL  LAST  DAYS  509 

not  what  may  come  with  tomorrow — I  am  hedg'd  in  every  way 
that  you  look  at  me — if  I  could  leave  Keats  for  a  while  every  day 
I  could  soon  raise  money  by  my  face  painting — but  he  will  not 
let  me  out  of  his  sight — he  cannot  bear  the  face  of  a  stranger — 
he  has  made  me  go  out  twice  and  leave  him  solus.  I'd  rather 
cut  my  tongue  out  than  tell  him  that  money  I  must  get — that 
would  kill  him  at  a  word — I  will  not  do  anything  that  may  add 
to  his  misery — for  I  have  tried  on  every  point  to  leave  for 
a  few  hours  in  the  day  but  he  wont  unless  he  is  left  alone — this 
won't  do — nor  shall  not  for  another  minute  whilst  he  is  John 
Keats. 

Yet  will  I  not  bend  down  under  these — I  will  not  give  myself 
a  jot  of  credit  unless  I  stand  firm — and  will  too — you'd  be  rejoiced 
to  see  how  I  am  kept  up — not  a  flinch  yet — I  read,  cook,  make 
the  beds — and  do  all  the  menial  offices — for  no  soul  comes  near 
Keats  except  the  doctor  and  myself — yet  I  do  all  this  with  a 
cheerful  heart — for  I  thank  God  my  little  but  honest  religion 
stays  me  up  all  through  these  trials.  I'll  pray  to  God  tonight 
that  He  may  look  down  with  mercy  on  my  poor  friend  and  myself. 
I  feel  no  dread  of  what  more  I  am  to  bear  but  look  to  it  with 
confidence. 


In  religion  Keats  had  been  neither  a  believer  nor  by 
any  means  (except  in  the  earliest  days  of  his  enthusiasm 
for  Leigh  Hunt)  a  scoffer;  respecting  Christianity  with- 
out calling  himself  a  Christian,  and  by  turns  clinging 
to  and  drifting  from  the  doctrine  of  human  immortality. 
Now,  on  his  death-bed,  says  Severn,  among  the  most 
haunting  and  embittering  of  his  distresses  was  the 
thought  that  not  for  him  were  those  ready  consolations 
of  orthodoxy  which  were  within  the  reach  of  every  knave 
and  fool.  After  a  time,  contrasting  the  steadfast  be- 
havioiu-  of  the  believer  Severn  with  his  own,  he  acknow- 
ledged anew  the  power  of  the  Christian  teaching  and 
example,  and  bidding  Severn  read  to  him  from  Jeremy 
Taylor's  Holy  Dying  and  Holy  Living^  strove  to  pass  the 
remainder  of  his  days  in  a  temper  of  more  peace  and 
constancy. 

The  danger  of  money  trouble  must  have  been  due  to 
a  pure  misunderstanding,  as  the  credit  at  Torlonia's 
was  in  fact  not  exhausted,  and  a  fresh  communication 
from  Mr  Taylor  removed  all  anxiety  on  that  score.    One 


510  CHOICE  OF  EPITAPH 

day  Keats  was  seized  with  a  desire  for  books  and  was 
able  for  a  time  to  take  pleasure  in  reading  those  which 
Severn  procured  for  him.  Another  and  continual 
pleasure  was  Severn's  playing  on  the  piano,  and  especi- 
ally his  playing  of  Haydn's  sonatas.  'With  all  his 
suffering  and  consciousness  of  approaching  death/ 
wrote  Severn  in  after  years,  'he  never  quite  lost  the 
play  of  his  cheerful  and  elastic  mind,  yet  these  happier 
moments  were  but  slight  snatches  from  his  misery,  like 
the  flickering  rays  of  the  sun  in  a  smothering  storm. 
Real  rays  of  sunshine  they  were,  all  the  same,  such  as 
would  have  done  honoiu-  to  the  brightest  health  and  the 
happiest  mind:  yet  the  storm  of  sickness  and  death 
was  always  going  on,  and  I  have  often  thought  that 
these  bursts  of  wit  and  cheerfulness  were  called  up  of 
set  purpose — ^were,  in  fact,  a  great  effort  on  my  account.' 
Neither  patient  nor  watcher  thought  any  more  of 
recovery.  For  a  few  days  Severn  had  the  help  of  an 
English  nurse.  It  was  doubtless  then  that  Keats  made 
his  friend  go  and  see  the  place  chosen  for  his  burial. 
'He  expressed  pleasure  at  my  description  of  the  locaHty 
of  the  Pyramid  of  Caius  Cestius,  about  the  grass  and 
the  many  flowers,  particularly  the  innumerable  violets — 
also  about  a  flock  of  goats  and  sheep  and  a  young 
shepherd — all  these  intensely  interested  him.  Violets 
were  his  favourite  flowers,  and  he  joyed  to  hear  how 
they  overspread  the  graves.  He  assured  me  that  he 
seemed  already  to  feel  the  flowers  growing  over  him': 
and  it  seems  to  have  been  gently  and  without  bitterness 
that  he  gave  for  his  epitaph  the  words,  partly  taken 
from  a  phrase  in  Beaumont  and  Fletcher's  Philastei^^ — 
'here  lies  one  whose  name  was  writ  in  water.'  Ever 
since  his  first  attack  at  Wentworth  Place  he  had  been 
used  to  speak  of  himself  as  living  a  posthumous  life, 
and  now  his  habitual  question  to  the  doctor  when  he 
came  in  was,  'Doctor,  when  will  this  posthumous  life 
of  mine  come  to  an  end?'     As  he  turned  to  ask  it 

*  Act  V,  Sc.  iii.    See  Harrison  S.  Morris  in  Bulletin  and  Review  of  the 
Keats-Shelley  Memorial,  1913,  p.  30. 


SPIRIT  OF  CHARM  AND  PLEASANTNESS  511 

neither  physician  nor  friend  could  bear  the  pathetic 
expression  of  his  eyes,  at  all  times  of  extraordinary 
power,  and  now  burning  with  a  sad  and  piercing  un- 
earthly brightness  in  his  wasted  cheeks.  Once  or  twice 
he  was  torn  again  by  too  sharp  a  reminder  of  vanished 
joys  and  hopes.  Severn  handed  him  a  letter  which  he 
supposed  to  be  from  Mrs  Brawne,  but  which  was  really 
from  her  daughter.  'The  glance  of  that  letter  tore  him 
to  pieces.  The  effects  were  on  him  for  many  days — 
he  did  not  read  it — ^he  could  not,  but  requested  me  to 
place  it  in  his  coffin  together  with  a  purse  and  a  letter 
(unopened)  of  his  sister's — since  which  time  he  has 
requested  me  not  to  place  that  letter,  but  only  his  sister's 
purse  and  letter  with  some  hair.'  Loveable  and  con- 
siderate ,to  the  last,  'his  generous  concern  for  me,' 
reiterates  Severn,  'in  my  isolated  position  at  Rome 
was  one  of  his  greatest  cares.'  His  response  to  kind- 
ness was  irresistibly  winning,  and  the  spirit  of  poetry 
and  pleasantness  was  with  him  to  the  end.  Severn 
tells  how  in  watching  Keats  he  used  sometimes  to  fall 
asleep,  and  awakening,  find  they  were  in  the  dark.  'To 
remedy  this  one  night  I  tried  the  experiment  of  fixing 
a  thread  from  the  bottom  of  a  lighted  candle  to  the 
wick  of  an  unlighted  one,  that  the  flame  might  be  con- 
ducted, all  which  I  did  without  teUing  Keats.  When 
he  awoke  and  found  the  first  candle  nearly  out,  he  was 
reluctant  to  wake  me  and  while  doubting  suddenly 
cried  out,  "Severn,  Severn,  here's  a  little  fairy  lamp- 
lighter actually  lit  up  the  other  candle."'  And  again: 
'Poor  Keats  has  me  ever  by  him,  and  shadows  out  the 
form  of  one  solitarj^  friend:  he  opens  his  eyes  in  great 
doubt  and  horror,  but  when  they  fall  on  me  they  close 
gently,  open  quietly  and  close  again,  till  he  sinks  to 
sleep.' 

Life  held  out  for  six  weeks  after  the  second  relapse, 
but  from  the  first  days  of  February  the  end  was  visibly 
drawing  near.  On  one  of  his  nights  of  vigil  Severn 
occupied  himself  in  making  that  infinitely  touching 
death-bed  drawing  in  black  and  white  of  his  friend  with 


512  THE  END 

which  all  readers  are  familiar.  Between  the  14th  and 
22nd  of  February  Severn  wrote  letters  to  Brown,  to 
Mrs  Brawne,  and  to  Haslam  to  prepare  them  for  the 
worst  and  to  tell  them  of  the  reconciled  and  tranquil 
state  into  which  the  dying  man  had  fallen.  Death 
came  very  peacefully  at  last.  On  the  23rd  of  that 
month,  writes  Severn,  *  about  four,  the  approaches  of 
death  came  on.  'Severn — I — ^lift  me  up — I  am  d3dng 
— I  shall  die  easy;  don't  be  frightened — ^be  firm,  and 
thank  God  it  has  come.'  I  lifted  him  up  in  my  arms. 
The  phlegm  seemed  boiling  in  his  throat,  and  increased 
imtil  eleven,  when  he  gradually  sank  into  death,  so 
quiet,  that  I  still  thought  he  slept.'  Three  days  later 
his  body  was  carried,  attended  by  several  of  the  English 
in  Rome  who  had  heard  his  story,  to  its  grave  in  that 
retired  and  verdant  cemetery  which  for  his  sake  and 
Shelley's  has  become  a  place  of  pilgrimage  to  the  English- 
speaking  world  for  ever. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

EPILOGUE 

Hopes  and  fears  at  home — Fanny  Brawne:  Leigh  Hunt — Supposed  effect 
of  reviews — Shelley  misled  and  inspired — Adonais — A  Blackwood 
Parody — False  impressions  confirmed — Death  of  Shelley — Hazlitt  and 
Severn — Brown  at  Florence — Inscription  for  Keats's  grave — Severn 
and  Walter  Scott — Slow  growth  of  Keats's  fame — Its  beginnings  at 
Cambridge — Opinion  in  the  early  'forties — Would-be  biographers  at 
odds — Taylor  and  Brown:  Brown  and  Dilke — A  solution:  Monckton 
Milnes — The  old  circle:  Hunt  and  Haydon — John  Hamilton  Reynolds 
— ^Haslam,  Severn,  Bailey — Flaws  and  sUps  in  Milnes's  work — Its  merit 
and  timeliness — Its  reception — The  Pre-Raphaelites — ^Rossetti  and 
Morris — ^The  battle  won:  Later  critics — ^Keats  and  Shelley — ^Pitfalls 
and  prejudices — ^Arnold  and  Palgrave — Mr.  Buxton  Forman  and  others 
— ^Latest  eulogists — Risks  to  permanence  of  fame — His  will  conquer — 
Youth  and  its  storms — The  might-have-been — Guesses  and  a  certainty. 

The  friends  of  Keats  at  home  had  in  their  love  for  him 
tried  hard  after  his  departure  to  nurse  some  sparks  of 
hope  for  his  recovery.  John  Hamilton  Reynolds, 
answering  from  Exmouth  a  letter  in  which  Taylor  told 
him  of  the  poet's  having  sailed,  wrote,  'I  am  very  much 
pleased  at  what  you  tell  me.  I  cannot  now  but  hold  a 
hope  of  his  refreshed  health,  which  I  confess  his  residence 
in  England  greatly  discouraged.  .  .  .  Keats,  then,  by 
this  is  at  sea  fairly — ^with  England  and  one  or  two  sincere 
friends  behind  hun, — and  with  a  warm  clime  before  his 
face !  If  ever  I  wished  well  to  Man,  I  wish  well  to  him ! ' 
Haslam  in  a  like  strain  of  feeling  wrote  in  December  to 
Severn  at  Rome: — 'The  climate,  however,  will,  I  trust, 
avail  him.  Keep  him  quiet,  get  the  winter  through; 
an  opening  year  in  Italy  will  perfect  everything.    Ere 

513 


514  HOPES  AND  FEARS  AT  HOME 

this  reaches  yoU;  I  trust  Doctor  Clark  will  have  con- 
firmed the  most  sanguine  hopes  of  his  friends  in  Eng- 
land; and  to  you,  my  friend,  I  hope  he  will  have  given 
what  you  stand  much  in  need  of — a  confidence  amount- 
ing to  a  faith.  .  .  .  Keats  must  get  himself  well  again, 
Severn,  if  but  for  us.  I,  for  one,  cannot  afford  to  lose 
him.  If  I  know  what  it  is  to  love,  I  truly  love  John 
Keats.'  The  letters  written  by  Severn  to  this  faithful 
friend  during  the  voyage  and  from  beside  the  sick-bed 
were  handed  round  and  eagerly  scanned  among  the 
circle.  Brown,  when  they  came  into  his  hands,  used  to 
read  passages  from  them  at  his  discretion  to  the  Brawne 
ladies  next  door,  keeping  the  darkest  from  the  daughter 
by  her  mother^s  wish.  Mrs  Brawne,  evidently  believing 
her  child's  heart  to  be  deeply  engaged,  dealt  in  the  same 
manner  with  Severn's  letters  to  herself.  The  girl  seems 
to  have  divined  none  the  less  that  her  lover's  condition 
was  past  hope,  and  her  demeanour,  according  to  Brown's 
account  as  follows,  to  have  been  himaan  and  natural. 
Keats,  writes  Brown  in  a  broken  style, — 

Keats  is  present  to  me  everywhere  and  at  all  times — ^he  now  seems 
sitting  by  my  side  and  looking  hard  in  my  face,  though  I  have 
taken  the  opportunity  of  writing  this  in  company — for  I  scarcely 
believe  I  could  do  it  alone.  Much  as  I  have  loved  him,  I  never 
knew  how  closely  he  was  wound  about  my  heart.  Mrs  Brawne 
was  greatly  agitated  when  I  told  her  of — and  her  daughter — I 
don't  know  how — ^for  I  was  not  present — yet  she  bears  it  with 
great  firmness,  mournfully  but  without  affectation.  I  understand 
she  says  to  her  mother,  *I  believe  he  must  soon  die,  and  when 
you  hear  of  his  death,  tell  me  immediately.    I  am  not  a  fool  I' 

As  the  news  grew  worse,  it  seems  to  have  been  more 
and  more  kept  back  from  her,  injudiciously  as  Brown 
thought,  and  in  a  mutilated  letter  he  gives  glimpses  of 
moods  in  her,  apparently  hysterical,  of  alternate  forced 
gaiety  and  frozen  silence.  A  letter  or  two  which  she  had 
written  to  her  dying  lover  were  withheld  from  him,  as 
we  have  seen,  by  reason  of  the  terrible  agitation  into 
which  the  mere  sight  of  her  handwriting  threw  him. 
We  hear  in  the  meantime  of  her  being  in  close  corre- 


FANNY  BRAWNE:    LEIGH  HUNT        515 

spondence  with  his  young  sister  at  Walthamstow. 
When  the  news  of  the  end  came,  Brown  writes, — 'I 
felt  at  the  moment  utterly  unprepared  for  it.  Then 
she — she  was  to  have  it  told  her,  and  the  worst  had  been 
concealed  from  her  knowledge  ever  since  yoiu*  December 
letter.  It  is  now  five  days  since  she  heard  it.  I  shall 
not  speak  of  the  first  shock,  nor  of  the  following  days, 
— ^it  is  enough  she  is  now  pretty  well, — and  thro'out 
she  has  shown  a  firmness  of  mind  which  I  Httle  expected 
from  one  so  yoimg,  and  under  such  a  load  of  grief .^ 

Leigh  Hunt  had  written  in  these  days  a  letter  to 
Severn  which  did  not  reach  Rome  imtil  after  Keats's 
death.  I  must  quote  it  as  showing  yet  again  the 
strength  of  the  hold  which  Keats  had  on  the  hearts  of  his 
friends,  and  how  he,  in  a  second  degree  only  to  Shelley, 
had  struck  on  something  much  deeper  in  Hunt's  nature 
than  the  sunny,  kindly,  easy-going  affectionateness 
which  was  all  that  in  most  relations  he  had  to  bestow: — 

Judge  how  often  I  thought  of  Keats,  and  with  what  feelings. 
Mr  Brown  tells  me  he  is  comparatively  calm  now.  If  he  can 
bear  to  hear  of  us,  pray  tell  him;  but  he  knows  it  all  already, 
and  can  put  it  in  better  language  than  any  man.  I  hear  he  does 
not  like  to  be  told  that  he  may  get  better,  nor  is  it  to  be  wondered 
at,  considering  his  firm  persuasion  that  he  shall  not  thrive. 
But  if  this  persuasion  should  happen  no  longer  to  be  so  strong 
upon  him,  or  if  he  can  now  put  up  with  such  attempts  to  console 
him,  remind  him  of  what  I  have  said  a  thousand  times,  and  what 
I  still  (upon  my  honour  I  swear)  think  always,  that  I  have  seen 
too  many  cases  of  recovery  from  apparently  desperate  cases  of 
consumption,  not  to  iudulge  in  hope  to  the  very  last.  If  he 
still  cannot  bear  this,  tell  hun — tell  that  great  poet  and  noble- 
hearted  man  that  we  shall  all  bear  his  memory  in  the  most 
precious  part  of  our  hearts,  and  that  the  world  shall  bow  their 
heads  to  it  as  our  loves  do.  Or  if  this  will  trouble  his  spirit, 
tell  him  that  we  shall  never  cease  to  remember  and  love  him, 
and  that  Christian  or  Infidel,  the  most  sceptical  of  us  has  faith 
enough  in  the  high  things  that  nature  puts  into  our  heads,  to 
think  that  all  who  are  of  one  accord  in  mind  or  heart  are  jour- 
neying to  one  and  the  same  place,  and  shall  meet  somehow 
or  other  again,  face  to  face,  mutually  conscious,  mutually  de- 
lighted. Tell  him  he  is  only  before  us  on  the  road,  as  he  was  in 
everything  else;    or  whether  you  tell  him  the  latter  or  no,  tell 


516        SUPPOSED  EFFECT  OF  EEVIEWS 

him  the  former,  and  add,  that  we  shall  never  forget  that  he  was 
so,  and  that  we  are  coming  after  him.  The  tears  are  again  in 
my  eyes,  and  I  must  not  afford  to  shed  them. 

During  Keats's  year  of  illness  and  dejection  at  home, 
and  untn  the  end  and  after  it,  the  general  impression 
among  his  friends  and  acquaintances  was  that  the  cause 
of  all  his  troubles  was  the  agony  of  mind  into  which  the 
hostile  reviews  had  thrown  him.  Severn  in  the  course 
of  his  tendance  discovered,  as  we  have  seen,  that  this 
was  not  so,  and  learnt  the  full  share  which  was  due  to 
the  pangs  of  imsatisfied,  and  in  a  worldly  sense  hopeless, 
passion  in  a  consumptive  constitution.  Brown  on  his 
part,  although  he  knew  the  secret  of  the  heart  which 
Keats  so  jealously  guarded,  yet  attributed  the  chief 
part  of  his  friend's  distress  to  the  fear  of  impending 
poverty — ^truly  another  contributing  cause — and  con- 
ceived a  fierce  and  obstinate  indignation  against  George 
for  having,  as  he  quite  falsely  imagined,  deliberately 
fleeced  his  brother,  as  well  as  against  other  friends  who 
had  borrowed  money  from  the  poet  and  failed  to  pay  it 
back.  But  most  of  those  who  knew  Keats  less  intimately, 
seeing  his  sudden  fall  from  robustness  and  high  spirits, 
— Shaving  never  thought  of  him  as  a  possible  consumptive 
subject, — and  being  themselves  white-hot  with  anger 
against  Blackwood  and  the  Quarterlyj — ^inferred  the 
poet's  feelings  from  their  own,  and  at  the  same  time 
added  fuel  to  their  wrath  against  the  critics,  by  taking 
it  for  granted  that  it  was  their  cruelty  which  was 
killing  him. 

To  no  one  was  this  impression  conveyed  in  a  more 
extravagant  form  than  to  Shelley,  presumably  through 
his  friends  the  Gisbomes.  In  that  letter  of  remonstrance 
to  Gifford,  as  editor  of  the  Quarterly ,  which  he  drafted  in 
the  autumn  of  1820  but  never  sent,  Shelley  writes: — 

Poor  Keats  was  thrown  into  a  dreadful  state  of  mind  by  this 
review,  which  I  am  persuaded,  was  not  written  with  any  intention 
of  producing  the  effect,  to  which  it  has,  at  least,  greatly  contri- 
buted, of  embittering  his  existence,  and  inducing  a  disease  from 
which  there  are  now  but  faint  hopes  of  his  recovery.    The  first 


SHELLEY  MISLED  AND  INSPIRED      517 

effects  are  described  to  me  to  have  resembled  insanity,  and  it 
was  by  assiduous  watching  that  he  was  restrained  from  effecting 
purposes  of  suicide.  The  agony  of  his  sufferings  at  length  pro- 
duced the  rupture  of  a  blood-vessel  in  the  lungs,  and  the  usual 
process  of  consumption  appears  to  have  begun. 

In  the  preface  to  Adonais,  composed  at  San  Giuliano, 
near  Pisa,  in  the  June  following  Keats's  death  in  the 
next  year,  Shelley  repeats  the  same  delusion  in  different 
words,  adding  the  still  less  justified  statement, — ^pro- 
bably founded  by  his  informant,  Colonel  Finch,  on 
expressions  used  by  Brown  to  Severn  about  George 
Keats  and  other  borrowers, — that  Keats's  misery  had 
been  'exasperated  by  the  bitter  sense  of  unrequited 
benefits: — ^the  poor  fellow  seems  to  have  been  hooted 
from  the  stage  of  life,  no  less  by  those  on  whom  he  had 
wasted  the  promise  of  his  genius,  than  those  on  whom 
he  had  lavished  his  fortune  and  his  care.'  Of  the 
critical  attacks  upon  Keats,  Shelley  seems  not  to  have 
known  the  Blackwood  lampoons,  and  to  have  put  down 
all  the  mischief  (as  did  Byron  following  him)  to  the 
Quarterly  alone.  With  his  heart  and  soul  full  of  passion- 
ate poetic  regret  for  what  the  world  had  lost  in  the 
death  of  the  author  of  Hyperion,  and  of  passionate 
human  indignation  against  the  supposed  agents  of  his 
undoing,  Shelley  wrote  that  lament  for  Keats  which  is 
the  best  of  his  longer  poems  and  next  to  Lycidas  the 
noblest  of  its  class  in  the  language.  Like  Milton, 
Shelley  chose  to  conform  to  a  consecrated  convention 
and  link  his  work  to  a  long  tradition  by  going  back  to 
the  precedent  of  the  Sicilian  pastoral  elegies,  those 
beautiful  examples  of  a  form  even  in  its  own  day  con- 
ventional and  literary.  He  took  two  masterpieces  of 
that  school,  the  dirge  or  ritual  chant  of  Bion  on  the 
death  of  Adonis  and  the  elegy  of  Moschus  on  the  death 
of  Bion,  and  into  strains  directly  caught  and  blended 
from  both  of  these  wove  inseparably  a  new  strain  of 
imagery  and  emotion  entirely  personal  and  his  own. 

The  human  characteristics  of  the  lamented  person,  the 
flesh  and  blood  reahties  of  life,  are  not  touched  or  thought 


618  ADONAIS 

upon.  A  rushing  train  of  abstractions,  such  as  were  at 
all  times  to  Shelley  more  inspiring  and  more  intensely 
realized  than  persons  and  things, — a  rushing  train  of 
beautiful  and  sorrowful  abstractions  sweeps  by,  in 
Adonais,  to  a  strain  of  music  so  entrancing  that  at  a 
first,  or  even  at  a  twentieth,  reading  it  is  perhaps  more 
to  the  music  of  the  poem  than  to  its  imagery  that  the 
spiritual  sense  of  the  reader  attends.  Nevertheless  he 
will  find  at  last  that  the  imagery,  all  unsubstantial  as 
it  is,  has  been  floated  along  the  music  into  his  mental 
being  to  haimt  and  live  with  him:  he  will  be  conscious 
of  a  possession  for  ever  in  that  invocation  of  the  celestial 
Muse  to  awake  and  weep  for  the  yoimgest  of  her  sons, 
— ^that  pageant  of  the  dead  poet's  own  dreams  and 
imaginations  conceived  as  gathering  4ike  mist  oVer  an 
autumnal  stream'  to  attend  upon  his  corpse, — the  voice 
of  Echo  silenced  (again  a  direct  adaptation  from  the 
Greek)  since  she  has  no  longer  words  of  his  to  repeat 
and  awaken  the  spring  withal, — the  vision  of  the  coming 
of  Urania  to  the  death  chamber, — her  lament,  with  its 
side-shafts  of  indignation  against  the  wolves  and  ravens 
who  have  made  her  youngest-bom  their  prey — the 
approach  and  homage  of  the  other  'mountain  shep- 
herds,' Byron,  Shelley  himself,  Moore,  Leigh  Himt,  all 
figured,  especially  Shelley,  in  a  guise  purely  abstract 
and  mythologic  and  yet  after  its  own  fashion  passion- 
ately true, — ^the  bitter  ironic  application  to  the  reviewers 
of  the  verses  from  Moschus  used  as  a  motto  to  the  poem, — 

Our  Adonais  has  drunk  poison — oh  I 

What  deaf  and  viperous  murderer  could  crown 

Life's  early  cup  with  such  a  draught  of  woe  ? — 

the  swift  change  to  a  consolatory  strain  exhorting  the 
mourners  to  cease  their  grief  and  recognise  that  the  lost 
poet  is  made  one  with  Nature  and  that  it  is  Death  who 
is  dead,  not  he, — ^the  invitation  to  the  beautiful  burial- 
place  at  Rome, — the  high  strain  of  Platonic  meditation 
on  the  transcendental  permanence  of  the  One  while  the 
Many  changg  and  pass, — the  final  vision  by  the  rapt 


A  BLACKWOOD  PARODY  519 

spirit  of  Shelley  of  the  soul  of  his  brother  poet  beckoning 
like  a  star  from  the  abode  of  the  Eternals. 

Looking  upon  his  own  work  in  his  modest  and  un- 
sanguine  way,  Shelley  could  not  suppress  the  hope  that 
this  time  he  had  written  something  that  should  not  be 
utterly  neglected.  He  had  the  poem  printed  at  Pisa, 
whence  a  small  number  of  copies  only  were  sent  to 
England.  One  immediate  effect  was  to  instigate  the 
last  and  silliest — ^happily,  perhaps,  also  the  least  remem- 
bered— of  the  Blackwood  blackguardries.  Not  even  the 
tragic  experiences  of  the  preceding  winter  had  cured  the 
conductors  of  that  journal  of  their  taste  for  savage 
ribaldry.  John  Scott,  the  keen-witted  and  warm- 
hearted editor,  formerly  of  the  Champion  and  latterly 
of  Taylor^s  and  Hessey's  London  Magazine,  had  de- 
nounced the  'Z'  papers,  and  demanded  a  disclosure 
of  Lockhart^s  share  in  them  and  in  the  management  of 
the  magazine,  in  terms  so  peremptory  and  scathing  that 
the  threat  of  a  challenge  from  Lockhart  followed  as  an 
inevitable  consequence.  The  clumsy,  well  meant  intro- 
mission of  third  parties  had  only  the  effect  of  sub- 
stituting Lockhart's  friend  Christie  in  the  broil  for 
Lockhart  himself.  The  duel  was  fought  on  January  16, 
1821,  exactly  a  week  before  Keats's  death,  and  Scott 
was  killed.  None  the  less,  when  late  in  the  summer  of 
the  same  year  copies  of  Adonais  reached  England, 
remarks  on  it  outdoing  all  previous  outbreaks  in  folly 
and  insolence  were  contributed  to  Blackwood  by  a  com- 
paratively new  recruit,  the  learned  and  drunken  young 
Dublin  scholar  Wilham  Maginn.  Professing  absurdly  to 
regard  the  cockney  school  as  a  continuation  of  the 
'Delia  Cruscan'  school  laughed  out  of  existence  by 
Gifford  some  five-and-twenty  years  earlier,  the  writer 
includes  Shelley  of  all  men  (forgetting  former  laudations 
of  him)  among  the  cockneys,  flings  up  a  heel  at  the 
memory  of  Keats  as  '  a  young  man  who  had  left  a  decent 
calling  for  the  melancholy  trade  of  cockney-poetry  and 
has  lately  died  of  a  consumption  after  having  written 
two  or  three  little  books  of  verse  much  neglected  by  the 


520       FALSE  IMPRESSIONS  CONFIRMED 

public';  and  proceeds  to  give  a  comic  analysis  of 
AdonaiSj  with  some  specimens  of  parody  upon  it,  which 
were  afterwards  re-pubHshed  without  shame  under 
Maginn's  name. 

Eight  years  later,  as  we  shall  see,  it  was  on  the  en- 
thusiasm of  a  band  of  young  Cambridge  men  for  Adonais 
that  the  fame  of  Keats  began  to  be  spread  abroad  among 
our  younger  generation  in  England.  In  the  meantime 
the  chief  effect  of  the  poem  was  to  confirm  in  the  minds 
of  the  few  readers  whom  it  reached  the  sentimental 
view  of  Keats  as  an  over-sensitive  weakling  whom  the 
breath  of  hostile  criticism  had  withered  up.  And  when 
two  years  later  Byron  printed  in  the  eleventh  canto  of 
Don  Juan  his  patronizing  semi-palinode,  part  laudatory 
part  contemptuous,  on  Keats,  his  closing  couplet, 

Strange  that  the  mind,  that  very  fiery  particle. 
Should  let  itself  be  snuffed  out  by  an  article, 

stamped  that  impression  for  good  on  the  minds  of  men 
in  far  wider  circles,  imtil  the  publication  of  Monckton 
Milnes's  memoir  after  five-and-twenty  years  brought 
evidence  to  modify  if  not  to  efface  it. 

None  of  Keats's  friends  at  home  did  anything  in  the 
days  following  his  death  to  coimteract  such  impression. 
Some  of  them,  as  we  have  said,  fully  shared  and  helped 
to  propagate  it.  Haydon,  writing  to  Miss  Mitford  soon 
after  the  news  of  the  death  reached  England,  says 
'Keats  was  a  victim  of  personal  abuse  and  want  of 
nerve  to  bear  it.  Ought  he  to  have  simk  in  that  way 
because  a  few  quizzers  told  him  he  was  an  apothecary's 
apprentice?  .  .  .  Fiery,  impetuous,  ungovernable  and  im- 
decided,  he  expected  the  world  to  bow  at  once  to  his 
talents  as  his  friends  had  done,  and  he  had  not  patience 
to  bear  the  natural  irritation  of  envy  at  the  imdoubted 
proof  he  gave  of  strength.'  In  his  private  journal 
Haydon  treats  the  events  in  the  same  spirit,  not  for- 
getting to  imply  a  contrast  between  Keats's  weakness 
and  his  own  power  of  stubbornly  presenting  his  prickles 
to  his  enemies.    Reynolds,  it  would  seem,  had  more 


DEATH  OF  SHELLEY  521 

excuse  than  others  for  adopting  the  same  view,  inasmuch 
as  Keats  had  said  to  him  on  his  sick-bed,  in  one  of  his 
extremely  rare  allusions  to  the  subject, — ^If  I  die,  you 
must  ruin  Lockhart.'  In  the  summer  following  Keats's 
death,  Reynolds  published  a  little  voliune  of  verse 
dedicated  to  the  young  bride  at  whose  bidding  he  was 
abandoning  literature  for  law,  and  included  in  it  the  two 
versified  tales  from  Boccaccio  which  he  had  originally 
planned  for  printing  together  with  Keats's  Isabella:  as 
to  which  pieces  he  says, — 

They  were  to  have  been  associated  with  tales  from  the  same 
source,  intended  to  have  been  written  by  a  friend,  but  illness  on 
his  part,  and  distracting  engagements  on  mine,  prevented  us 
from  accomplishing  our  plan  at  the  time;  and  Death  now,  to 
my  deep  sorrow,  has  frustrated  it  for  ever!  He,  who  is  gone, 
was  one  of  the  very  kindest  friends  I  possessed,  and  yet  he  was 
not  kinder  perhaps  to  me,  than  to  others.  His  intense  mind 
and  powerful  feeling  would,  I  truly  believe,  have  done  the  world 
some  service,  had  his  life  been  spared — but  he  was  of  too  sensitive 
a  nature — and  thus  he  was  destroyed  I 

Later  in  the  same  summer,  1822,  befell  the  tragedy  of 
Shelley's  own  death,  such  a  tragedy  of  a  poet's  death  as 
a  poet  might  have  loved  to  invent  with  all  its  circimi- 
stances, — ^the  disappearance  of  the  boat  in  a  squall;  the 
recovery  of  the  body  with  the  volume  of  Keats's  poems 
in  the  coat-pocket;  its  consumption  on  a  fimeral  pyre 
by  the  Tuscan  shore  in  the  presence  of  Leigh  Hunt, 
newly  come  to  Italy  on  Shelley's  invitation,  of  Byron, 
and  of  the  Cornish  sea-rover  and  social  rebel  Trelawny, 
a  personage  who  might  weU  have  been  a  creation  of 
Byron's  brain;  the  snatching  of  the  heart  from  the 
flames;  the  removal  of  the  ashes  to  Rome,  and  their 
deposit  in  a  new  Protestant  burial-ground  adjacent  to 
the  old,  where  the  remains  of  Trelawny  were  to  be 
laid  beside  them  after  the  lapse  of  nearly  sixty  years. 

Two  years  later  again,  when  Byron  had  himseK  died 
during  the  struggle  for  the  liberation  of  Greece,  Hazlitt 
took  occasion  to  criticize  Shelley's  posthumous  poems 
in  the  Edinburgh  Review,  and  having  his  own  bitter 
grounds  of  quarrel  with  the  Blackwood  gang,  strained 


522  HAZLITT  AND  SEVERN 

the  bonds  of  prose  in  an  outburst  of  half-lyric  indignation 
on  behalf  of  Keats  as  follows: — 

Mr  Shelley  died,  it  seems,  with  a  volume  of  Mr  Keats's  poetry 
grasped  with  one  hand  in  his  bosom !  These  are  two  out  of 
four  poets,  patriots  and  friends,  who  have  visited  Italy  within 
a  few  years,  both  of  whom  have  been  soon  hurried  to  a  more 
distant  shore.  Keats  died  young;  and  *yet  his  infelicity  had 
years  too  many/  A  canker  had  blighted  the  tender  bloom  that 
o'erspread  a  face  in  which  youth  and  genius  strove  with  beauty; 
the  shaft  was  sped — venal,  vulgar,  venomous,  that  drove  him 
from  his  country,  with  sickness  and  penury  for  companions,  and 
followed  him  to  his  grave.  And  yet  there  are  those  who  could 
trample  on  the  faded  flower — ^men  to  whom  breaking  hearts  are 
a  subject  of  merriment — ^who  laugh  loud  over  the  silent  urn  of 
Genius,  and  play  out  their  game  of  venality  and  infamy  with  the 
crumbling  bones  of  their  victims ! 

Severn,  living  on  at  Rome  in  the  halo  of  sympathy  and 
regard  with  which  the  story  of  his  friend's  death  and  his 
own  devotion  had  justly  surrounded  him,  seems  to  have 
done  nothing  to  remove  from  the  minds  of  the  English 
colony  through  successive  years  an  impression  which  he 
knew  to  have  been  only  in  a  very  partial  measure  true. 
And  even  Brown,  when  in  the  year  after  Keats's  death 
he  came  out  with  his  natural  son,  a  child  of  a  few  years, 
to  make  his  home  in  Italy,  in  his  turn  let  himself  fall  in 
with  the  view  of  Keats's  sufferings  and  of  their  origin 
which  had  taken  such  strong  hold  on  the  minds  of  most 
persons  interested  and  conmiended  itself  so  naturally 
to  the  tender-hearted  and  the  righteously  indignant. 
Brown  did  not  come  to  Rome,  but  established  himself 
first  at  Pisa  and  afterwards  at  Florence.  At  Pisa  he 
saw  something  both  of  Trelawny  and  of  Byron,  who 
took  to  him  kindly;  and  made  several  contributions 
to  the  Liberal  during  the  brief  period  while  Hunt  con- 
tinued to  conduct  that  journal  at  Pisa  after  Shelley's 
death  and  before  his  final  rupture  with  Byron  and 
departure  from  Italy.  The  Greek  adventure  having  in 
1823  carried  off  Trelawny  for  a  season  and  Byron  never 
to  return.  Brown  settled  at  Florence  and  became  for 
some  years  a  popular  member  of  the  lettered  English 


BROWN  AT  FLORENCE  523 

colony  in  Tuscany,  living  in  intimacy  with  Seymour 
Kirkup,  the  artist  and  man  of  fortune  who  was  for  many 
years  the  centre  of  that  circle,  and  before  long  admitted 
to  the  regard  and  hospitality  of  Walter  Savage  Landor 
in  his  beautiful  Fiesolan  villa.  Landor,  as  readers  will 
hardly  need  to  be  reminded,  was  an  early,  firm,  and  just 
admirer  of  Keats's  poetry. 

It  was  not  until  some  five  years  after  Byron's  death 
in  Greece  that  Trelawny  came  back  to  settle  for  a  while 
again  in  Tuscany.  Then,  in  1829,  he  and  Brown  being 
at  the  time  housemates.  Brown  helped  him  in  preparing 
for  the  press  his  autobiographical  romance.  The  Adven- 
tures of  a  Younger  Son,  and  especially  by  suppl3dng 
mottoes  in  verse  for  its  chapter-headings,  chiefly  from 
the  unpubHshed  poems  of  Keats  in  his  possession.  One 
day  Trelawny  said  to  him  that  'Brown'  was  no  right 
distinguishing  name  for  a  man,  or  even  for  a  family, 
but  merely  the  name  of  a  tribe:  whereupon  and  whence- 
forward,  adding  to  his  own  Christian  name  one  that  had 
been  borne  by  a  deceased  brother,  he  took  to  styling 
himself,  not  always  in  famihar  but  regularly  in  formal 
signatures,  Charles  Armitage  Brown.  It  is  both  ana- 
chronism and  pedantry  to  give  him  these  names,  as  is 
often  done,  in  writing  of  him  in  connexion  with  Keats, 
to  whom  he  was  never  smjihing  but  plain  Charles 
Brown. 

Of  Keats  Brown's  thoughts  had  in  the  meantime' 
remained  full.  From  his  first  arrival  in  Italy  he  had 
been  in  close  commimication  with  Severn  as  to  the 
memorial  stone  and  inscription  to  be  placed  over  the 
poet's  grave  at  Rome  and  as  to  the  biography  to  be  written 
of  him.  He  let  the  wish  expressed  by  Keats  that  his 
epitaph  should  be  'here  lies  one  whose  name  was  writ  in 
water'  stand  for  him  as  an  absolute  command,  and 
studied  how  to  combine  those  words  with  others  ex- 
plaining their  choice  as  due  to  the  poet's  sense  of  neglect 
by  his  countrymen.  In  the  end  the  result  agreed  on 
between  him  and  Severn  was  that  which,  despite  much 
after-regret  on  Severn's  and  some  on  Brown's  part  and 


524     INSCRIPTION  FOR  KEATS^S  GRAVE 

many  proposals  of  change,  stiU  stands,  having  been 
carefully  re-cut  and  put  in  order  more  than  haK  a  cen- 
tury after  the  poet's  death: — ^namely  a  design  of  a  lyre 
with  only  two  of  its  strings  stnmg,  and  an  inscription 
perpetuating  the  idea  of  the  poet  having  been  a  victim 
to  the  malice  of  his  enemies: — 

THIS  GRAVE 

CONTAINS  ALL  THAT  WAS  MORTAL 

OF  A 

YOUNG  ENGLISH  POET 

WHO 

ON  HIS  DEATH  BED, 

IN  THE  BITTERNESS  OF  HIS  HEART, 

AT  THE  MALICIOUS  POWER  OF  HIS  ENEMIES, 

DESIRED 

these  words  to  be  engraven  on  ms  tomb  stone 

"here  lies  one 

whose  name  was  writ  in  water." 

February  24th,  1821. 

Severn  in  his  correspondence  with  Brown  at  Florence, 
and  with  Haslam  and  other  friends  at  home,  shows 
himself  always  loyally  anxious  to  attribute  to  his  con- 
nexion with  Keats  the  social  acceptance  and  artistic 
success  which  he  found  himself  enjoying  from  the  first 
at  Rome,  and  to  which  in  fact  his  own  actively  amiable 
nature,  his  winning  manners  and  facile,  suave  pictorial 
talent,  in  a  great  measure  contributed.  Though  the 
general  feeling  towards  the  memory  of  Keats  among 
English  residents  and  visitors  was  sympathetic,  there 
were  not  lacking  voices  to  repeat  the  stock  gibe, — 
'"his  name  was  writ  in  water";  yes,  and  his  poetry 
in  milk  and  water.'  Severn  eagerly  notes  any  signs  of 
increasing  appreciation  of  his  friend's  poetry,  or  of 
changed  opinion  on  the  part  of  scoffers,  that  came 
under  his  notice.  One  touching  incident  he  recorded 
in  later  life  as  having  happened  in  the  spring  of  1832, 
the  eleventh  year  after  Keats's  death.  Sir  Walter 
Scott,  stricken  with  premature  decrepitude  from  the 
labour  and  strain  of  mind  undergone  in  his  six  years' 


SEVERN  AND  WALTER  SCOTT  525 

colossal  effort  to  clear  himself  of  debt  after  the  Constable 
crash,  had  come  abroad  with  his  daughter  Aime  in  the 
hope  of  regaining  some  measure  of  health  and  strength 
from  rest  and  southern  air.^  He  spent  a  spring  month 
at  Rome,  surrounded  with  attentions  and  capable  of 
some  sight-seeing,  but  could  not  shake  off  his  grief  for 
what  he  had  lost  in  the  death  there  two  years  earHer  of 
his  beloved  Lady  Northampton,  whose  beauty  and 
charm  and  gift  for  verse  and  song  (her  singing  portrait 
by  Raebum  is  one  of  the  most  beautiful  in  the  world) 
had  endeared  her  to  him  from  childhood  in  her  island 
home  in  Mull.  Scott's  distress  in  thinking  of  her  was 
pitiable,  and  he  found  some  relief  in  pouring  himself  out 
to  the  sympathetic  Severn,  who  had  known  her  well. 

By  Scott's  desire  Severn  went  every  morning  to  see  him, 
generally  bringing  some  pictiu-e  or  sketch  to  amuse  him. 
One  morning  Severn  having  innocently  shown  him  the 
portrait  of  Keats  reproduced  at  page  338  of  this  book, 
and  said  something  about  his  genius  and  fate,  observed 
Anne  Scott  turn  away  flushed  and  embarrassed,  while 
Scott  took  Severn's  hand  to  close  the  interview,  and 
said  falteringly,  'yes,  yes,  the  world  finds  out  these 
things  for  itself  at  last.'  The  story  has  been  commonly, 
but  without  reason,  scouted  as  though  it  implied  a  guilty 
conscience  in  Scott  himself  as  to  the  Blackwood  lampoons. 
It  impKes  nothing  of  the  kind.  Scott  had  indeed  had 
nothing  to  do  with  these  matters:  but  one  of  his  nearest 
and  dearest  had.  The  current  belief  that  the  death  of 
Keats  had  been  caused  or  hastened  by  Lockhart's  attack 
in   Blackwood,   with   the   tragic   circumstances   of   the 

1  Everyone  knows  Wordsworth's  beautiful  sonnet  of  God-speed  to  him. 
Haydon  went  to  call  on  the  great  man,  who  had  always  been  kind  to  him, 
as  he  passed  through  London,  and  except  for  two  imfortunately  chosen 
words,  is  at  his  very  best  in  this  picture  of  their  parting: — 'After  a  quarter 
of  an  hour  I  took  my  leave,  and  as  I  arose  he  got  up,  took  his  stick,  with 
that  sidelong  look  of  his,  and  then  burst  forth  that  beautiful  smile  of  heart 
and  feeling,  geniaUty  of  soul,  manly  courage  and  tenderness  of  mien, 
which  neither  painter  nor  sculptor  has  ever  touched.  It  was  the  smile 
of  a  superior  creature  who  would  have  gathered  humanity  under  the 
shelter  of  its  wings  and  while  he  was  amused  at  its  foUies  would  have 
saved  it  from  sorrow  and  sheltered  it  from  pain.'  {Life  of  B,  R.  Haydon, 
ed.  Taylor,  ii,  321.) 


626      SLOW  GROWTH  OF  KEATS'S  FAME 

Christie-Scott  duel,  however  little  he  may  have  said 
about  them,  will  assuredly  have  left  in  a  heart  so  great 
and  tender  an  abiding  regret  and  pain,  and  his  manner 
and  words  on  being  reminded  of  them,  as  recorded  by 
Severn,  are  perfectly  in  character. 

By  degrees  the  signs  of  admiration  for  Keats's  work 
noted  by  Severn  become  more  frequent.  Young  Mr 
Gladstone,  coming  fresh  from  Oxford  to  Rome  in  this 
same  year  1832,  seeks  him  out  because  of  his  friendship 
for  the  poet.  Another  year  a  group  of  gentlemen  and 
ladies  in  the  English  colony  propose  to  give  an  amateur 
performance  of  the  unpubhshed  Otto  the  Great j  a  proposal 
never,  it  would  seem,  carried  out.  But  despite  the  loyal 
enthusiasm  of  special  English  circles  abroad  and  the 
untiring  tributes  of  Leigh  Hunt  and  other  friends  and 
admirers  at  home,  his  repute  among  the  reading  pubHc 
in  general  was  of  extraordinarily  slow  growth.  Iq  the 
interval  of  some  score  of  years  between  the  death  of 
Byron  and  the  establishment — ^itseK  slow  and  contested 
— of  Tennyson's  position,  Byron  and  Scott  held  with 
most  even  of  open-minded  judges  an  uncontested 
sovereignty  among  recent  English  poets;  while  among 
a  growing  minority  the  fame  of  Wordsworth  steadily 
grew,  and  the  popular  and  sentimental  suffrage  was  given 
to  writers  of  the  calibre  of  Felicia  Hemans  and  Letitia 
Landon,  feminine  talents  and  temperaments  truly  not 
to  be  despised,  however  ephemeral  has  proved  their  fame. 

So  small  was  the  demand  for  Keats's  poetry  that 
the  remaining  stock  of  his  original  three  volumes  sufficed 
throughout  nearly  this  score  of  years  to  supply  it.  The 
yeast  was  nevertheless  working.  We  know  of  one 
famous  instance,  so  far  back  as  1825,  when  a  gift  of 
the  original  volimies  of  Keats  and  Shelley  inspired  the 
recipient — ^the  lad  Robert  Browning,  then  aged  fourteen 
— ^with  a  fervent  and  wholly  new  conception,  as  he  used 
afterwards  to  declare,  of  the  scope  and  power  of  poetry. 
Young  John  Sterling,  writing  in  1828  in  the  Athenccuniy 
of  which  his  friend  and  senior  Frederick  Denison  Maurice 
was  for  the  time  being  editor,  showed  which  way  the 


ITS  BEGINNINGS  AT  CAMBRIDGE      527 

wind  was  beginning  to  blow  at  Cambridge  when  he  said, 
'Keats,  whose  memory  they  (the  Blackwood  group) 
persevered  only  a  few  months  back  in  spitting  upon, 
was,  as  everyone  knows  who  has  read  him,  among  the 
most  intense  and  delightful  English  poets  of  oiu*  day. '  ^ 
But  no  reprint  of  Keats's  poems  was  pubHshed  until 
1829,  and  then  only  by  the  Paris  house  of  Galignani, 
who  printed  for  the  continental  market,  in  a  single  tall 
volume  with  double  colimans,  a  collective  edition  of  the 
poems  of  Shelley,  Coleridge,  and  Keats.^  The  same  year 
saw  the  reprint  of  Adonais  on  the  initiative  of  Arthur 
Hallam  and  his  group  of  undergraduate  friends  at 
Cambridge,  and  the  visit  of  three  of  the  group,  Hallam 
himself,  Monckton  Mihies,  and  Sunderland,  to  uphold 
in  debate  at  Oxford  the  opinion  that  Shelley  was  a  greater 
poet  than  Byron.  Their  enthusiasm  for  Adonais  impHed 
enthusiasm  for  its  subject,  Keats,  as  a  matter  of  com^e. 

Alfred  Tennyson  was  a  close  associate  of  this  group;  and 
from  the  first,  among  recent  influences,  it  was  that  of 
Keats  which  did  most  to  coloiu*  his  style  in  poetry  and 
make  him  strive  to  'load  every  rift  of  a  subject  with 
ore/  His  friend  Edward  FitzGerald  shared  the  same 
admiration  to  the  full.  But  these  young  pioneer  spirits 
still  stood,  except  for  the  siu^ving  band  of  Keats's 
early  friends,  almost  alone.  Wilson,  it  is  true,  with 
whom  consistency  counted  for  nothing,  had  by  this  time 
shown  signs  of  wavering,  and  in  his  character  as  Chris- 
topher North  speaks  of  Keats's  'genius'  being  shown  to 
best  advantage  in  Lamia  and  Isabella, — ^but  does  so,  we 
feel,  less  for  the  sake  of  praising  Keats  than  of  getting 
in  a  dig  at  Jeffrey  for  having  praised  him  tardily  and 
indiscriminately.^  The  Quarterly  remained  quite  im- 
penitent, and  in  a  review  of  Tennyson's  second  volume 
of  1832  writes  of  him  with  viciously  laboured  irony  as 
'a  new  prodigy  of  genius — another  and  brighter  star  of 

*  John  Sterling,  Essays  and  Tales,  ii,  53. 

2  Carefully  edited,  it  is  believed  by  Cyrus  Redding,  formerly  an  employ^ 
of  the  house. 
^  Nodes  Ambrosianae,  ii,  146:  from  Blackwood  for  December,  1828. 


528     OPINION  IN  THE  EARLY  TORTIES 

a  galaxy  or  milky  way  of  poetry,  of  which  the  lamented 
Keats  was  the  harbinger';  and  then  follows  a  gibing 
testimony,  to  be  read  in  the  same  inverted  sense,  of  the 
vast  popularity  which  Endymion  has  notoriously  at- 
tained.^ So  far  as  popularity  was  concerned,  the 
Quarterly  gibe  remained  justified.  It  was  not  imtil 
1840  that  there  appeared  in  England  the  first  separate 
reprint  of  Keats's  collected  poems:  ^  what  is  sad  to 
relate  is  that  even  this  edition  found  a  scanty  sale,  and 
that  before  long  'remainder'  copies  of  it  were  being 
bound  up  by  the  booksellers  with  the  'remainders'  of 
another  unsuccessful  issue  of  the  day,  the  series  of  Bells 
and  Pomegranates  by  Robert  Browning. 

After  an  interval  of  thirteen  years,  John  Sterling  must 
still,  in  1841,  write  to  Julius  Hare  as  follows: — 

Lately  I  have  been  reading  again  some  of  Alfred  Tennyson's 
second  volumes,  and  with  profound  admiration  of  his  truly  lyric 
and  idyllic  genius.  There  seems  to  me  to  have  been  more  epic 
power  in  Keats,  that  fiery  beautiful  meteor;  but  they  are  two 
most  true  and  great  poets.  When  one  thinks  of  the  amount  of 
recognition  they  have  received,  one  may  well  bless  God  that 
poetry  is  in  itself  strength  and  joy,  whether  it  be  crowned  by  all 
mankind  or  left  alone  in  its  own  magic  hermitage.^ 

So  late  as  1844,  Jeffrey,  who  in  spite  of  the  justice  he 
had  been  induced  to  do  to  Keats  in  his  lifetime,  had  no 
real  belief  in  the  new  poetry  and  was  an  instinctive 
partisan  of  the  conventional  eighteenth-century  style, 
could  write  that  the  'rich  melodies'  of  Keats  and 
Shelley  were  passing  out  of  pubHc  memory,  and  that 
the  poets  of  their  age  destined  to  enduring  fame  were 
Campbell  and  Rogers.  De  Quincey  in  1845  could 
grotesquely  insult  the  memory  and  belittle  the  work  of 
Keats  in  a  passage  pouring  scorn  on  Endymion,  treating 
Hyperion  as  his  only  achievement  that  counted,  and 

1  Quarterly  Review,  April  1833,  page  81.  The  article  was  long  supposed 
to  be  by  Lockhart  himself,  but  Mr  Prothero  has  proved  that  it  was  by 
Croker. 

*  In  W.  Smith's  Standard  Library,  exactly  reprinted  from  the  Galignani 
edition.  America  had  in  this  matter  been  in  advance  of  England,  an 
edition  of  the  poet's  works  having  appeared  at  Buffalo  in  1834. 

'  Essays  and  Totes,  p.  clxviii. 


WOULD-BE  BIOGRAPHERS  AT  ODDS     529 

ending, — 'Upon  this  mother  tongue,  upon  this  English 
language  has  Keats  trampled  as  with  the  hoofs  of  a 
buffalo.  With  its  syntax,  with  its  prosody,  with  its 
idiom,  he  has  played  such  fantastic  tricks  as  could  only 
enter  the  heart  of  a  barbarian,  and  for  which  only  the 
anarchy  of  Chaos  could  furnish  a  forgiving  audience. 
Verily  it  required  Hyperion  to  weigh  against  the  deep 
treason  of  these  unparalleled  offences.'  ^ 

In  the  meantime  none  of  Keats's  friends  had  succeeded 
in  doing  anything  to  strengthen  his  reputation  or  make 
his  true  character  known  by  the  publication  either  of  a 
personal  memoir  or  of  his  poetry  that  remained  in  manu- 
script. Several  of  them  had  fully  desired  and  intended 
to  do  both  these  things.  But  mutual  jealousies  and 
dislikes,  such  as  are  but  too  apt  to  break  out  among  the 
siu^ving  intimates  of  a  man  of  genius,  had  prevented 
any  such  purpose  taking  effect.  Taylor  and  Woodhouse 
had  been  first  in  the  field,  collecting  what  material  for 
a  memorial  volume  they  could,  including  the  transcripts 
zealously  made  by  Woodhouse  from  Keats's  papers 
while  he  was  alive,  and  others,  both  verse  and  corre- 
spondence, which  they  had  borrowed  from  Reynolds. 
But  help  both  from  Brown  and  from  George  Keats  would 
have  been  necessary  to  give  anything  like  completeness 
to  their  work;  and  Brown,  who  himself  desired  to  be 
his  friend's  biographer,  looked  askance  at  them  and 
their  project.  As  for  information  or  material  from 
George  Keats,  Brown  on  his  part  was  debarred  from 
seeking  it  by  his  obstinate  conviction,  reiterated  in  all 
companies  and  on  all  occasions  and  naturally  resented 
by  its  subject,  that  George  was  a  traitor,  cheat,  and 
villain.  When  Fanny  Keats  came  of  age  in  1824,  the 
duty  devolved  on  Dilke  of  going  into  the  family  accounts 
and  putting  pressure  on  Abbey,  who  had  proved  a 
mudciier  both  of  his  wards'  affairs  and  of  his  own,  to 
make  over  the  residue  of  the  estate  which  he  held  in  trust. 

^  Notes  on  Gilfillan^s  Literary  Portraits:  Collected  Works,  xi,  393.  It 
is  fair  to  add  that  twelve  years  later  De  Quincey  went  a  good  way  in 
recantation  of  this  outburst. 


530  TAYLOR  AND  BROWN:  BROWN  AND  DILKE 

In  the  discharge  of  this  duty  Dilke  satisfied  himself,  as 
a  practical  man  of  business,  that  George's  conduct  had 
been  strictly  upright  and  his  motives  honourable.  But 
Brown  refused  to  let  his  prejudices  be  shaken;  and  he 
and  Dilke,  though  they  met  both  in  Italy  and  later  in 
England,  were  never  again  on  their  old  terms  of  friend- 
ship and  mutual  regard.  Brown,  criticizing  Dilke  in  his 
influential  position  as  editor  of  the  Athenceum  after  1830 
and  as  a  learned  and  recognized  authority  on  various 
problems  of  literary  history,  declares  that  he  has  become 
dogmatic  and  arrogant  from  success.  Dilke,  writing 
confidentially  of  Brown,  scouts  the  notion  which  had 
got  abroad  of  his  having  been  a  'generous  benefactor' 
to  Keats,  and  insists  that  he  had  always  expected  to 
profit  by  a  Hterary  partnership  with  the  poet,  and  after 
his  death  had  demanded  and  received  from  the  estate 
payment  in  full,  with  interest,  of  all  advances  made 
by  him. 

So  much — and  the  reader  may  hold  it  more  than 
enough — ^in  order  to  explain  why  no  suflicient  memoir 
of  Keats  or  collection  of  his  remains  could  be  published 
by  his  surviving  friends.  Brown,  indeed,  wrote  some 
ten  years  after  Keats's  death  the  brief  memoir  of  which 
I  have  freely  made  use  in  these  pages,  and  tried  some 
editors  with  it,  but  in  vain.  Destiny  had  provided 
otherwise  and  better.  One  of  the  Cambridge  group  of 
Shelley-Keats  enthusiasts  of  1830,  Richard  Monckton 
Milnes,  being  in  Italy  with  his  family  not  long  after  his 
degree,  visited  Rome  and  Florence  in  1833  and  1834, 
and  with  his  genius  for  knowing,  liking,  and  being  liked 
by  everybody,  made  immediate  friends  with  Severn  at 
Rome,  and  at  Florence  soon  found  his  way  to  Landor's 
home  at  the  Villa  Gherardesca,  and  there  met  and  was 
quickly  on  good  terms  with  Brown.  Some  two  or  three 
years  later  Brown  left  Tuscany  for  good  and  established 
himseK  at  Laira  Green,  near  Plymouth,  where  he  lived 
the  life  of  amateur  in  letters,  a  busy  local  lecturer  and 
contributor  to  local  journals,  and  published  his  very 
ingenious  interpretation  of  Shakespeare's  sonnets  as  a 


A  SOLUTION:    MONCKTON  MILNES     531 

cr3rptic  autobiography  of  the  poet,  continuing  the  while 
to  nurse  the  hope  and  desire  of  being  Keats's  biographer. 
He  had  all  but  concluded  an  arrangement  for  the  pub- 
lication of  his  memoir  in  the  Monthly  Chronicle^  when 
one  day  near  the  end  of  1840,  having  heard  a  lecture  on 
the  prospects  of  the  then  young  colony  of  New  Zealand, 
he  determined  suddenly  to  emigrate  thither  with  his 
son,  who  had  been  in  training  as  a  civil  engineer;  and 
before  he  left  designated  Monckton  Milnes,  with  whom 
he  had  not  ceased  to  keep  in  touch,  as  the  fit  man  to  do 
justice  to  Keats's  memory,  and  handed  to  him  all  his 
own  cherished  material. 

Within  a  year  Brown  had  died  in  New  Zealand  of  an 
apoplectic  stroke.  Monckton  Milnes  was  faithful  to  his 
trust,  but  not  swift  or  prompt  in  fulfilling  it.  That  was 
more  than  could  well  have  been  expected  of  a  man  of  so 
many  interests  and  pursuits  and  so  eager  in  them  aU, — 
poet,  politician,  orator,  wit,  entertainer,  athirst  and  full 
of  rehsh  for  every  varied  cup  of  experience  and  every 
social  or  intellectual  pleasure  or  activity,  or  opportunity 
for  help  or  kindness,  that  life  had  to  offer  him.  It  was 
not  until  the  fifth  year  after  Brown's  departure  that  he 
buckled  to  his  task.  He  began  by  collecting,  with  some 
measure  of  secretarial  help  from  Coventry  Patmore, 
further  information  and  material  from  all  the  surviving 
friends  of  Keats  whom  he  could  hear  of.  George  Keats 
had  died  at  Louisville,  Kentucky,  in  1842,  leaving  an 
honoured  memory  among  his  fellow  citizens;  and  his 
widow  had  taken  a  second  husband,  a  Mr  Jeffrey,  who  on 
Milnes's  request  sent  him  among  other  material  copies, 
unluckily  very  imperfect,  of  Keats's  incomparable 
journal-letters  to  George  and  to  herself.  From  Cowden 
Clarke,  the  happiest  of  all  Keats's  friends  in  after-life, 
happy  in  a  perfect  marriage,  the  simniest  of  dispositions, 
and  a  sustained  success  in  the  congenial  occupation  of  a 
pubHc  reader  in  and  lecturer  on  Shakespeare  and  other 
poets, — ^from  Cowden  Clarke  and  from  Keats's  younger 
school  friend  Edward  Holmes,  Milnes  drew  the  infor- 
mation about  Keats's  school  days  which  I  have  quoted 


532  THE  OLD  CIRCLE:    HUNT  AND  HAYDON 

above  almost  in  full.  Leigh  Hunt,  the  friend  whom 
Keats  owed  to  Clarke  and  who  had  had  the  most  decisive 
influence  on  his  life,  had  passed  with  advancing  years, 
not  indeed  out  of  his  lifelong,  lightly  borne  condition  of 
debt  and  poverty  and  embarrassment  and  household 
worry,  but  out  of  the  old  atmosphere  of  obloquy  and 
contention  into  one  of  peace,  and  of  affectionate  regard 
all  but  universal  as  the  most  genial  and  companionable, 
the  most  versatile,  industrious  and  sweet-natured  of 
literary  veterans,  praised  and  admired,  to  a  pitch  almost 
of  generous  passion,  even  by  the  growler  Carlyle,  who 
had  nothing  but  a  gibe  of  contempt  to  bestow  upon  the 
weaknesses  of  a  Lamb  or  a  Keats.  In  regard  to  Keats, 
Hunt  had  said  his  say,  personal  and  critical,  long  ago, 
in  the  unwise  but  in  its  day  grossly  over-reviled  book 
Lord  Byron  and  some  of  his  Contemporaries  (1828),  as 
well  as  in  many  incidental  notes  and  observations 
through  thirty  years,  and  especially  in  that  master- 
piece in  his  own  vein  of  criticism.  Imagination  and 
Fancy  (1844).  Accordingly  he  had  now  little  that  was 
fresh  to  tell  the  biographer.  As  for  Haydon,  the  destiny 
he  had  in  the  old  days  been  used  to  prophesy  for  Hunt, 
— even  such  a  destiny,  and  worse,  had  in  the  irony  of 
things  befallen  himself.  That  tragic  gulf  which  existed 
in  him  between  ambition  and  endowment,  between  tem- 
perament and  faculty,  had  led  him  through  ever  fiercer 
contentions  and  deeper  and  more  desperate  difficulties 
to  the  goal  of  suicide.  This  had  happened  in  the  days 
when  the  biographer  of  Keats  was  just  setting  hand  to 
his  task;  hence  such  accounts  of  the  poet  as  I  have 
quoted  from  Haydon  were  not  at  Milnes's  disposal,  but 
are  drawn  from  later  posthumous  publications  of  the 
painter's  journals  and  correspondence.  By  way  of 
farewell  to  this  ill-starred  overweening  half-genius,  I 
add  here  the  facsimile  of  a  page  from  a  letter  he  wrote  to 
EHzabeth  Barrett  in  1834,  describing  a  scene  of  rather 
squalid  tragi-comedy  which  he  and  Keats  had  witnessed 
at  Hunt's  Hampstead  cottage  seventeen  years  before, 
and  adding  from  memory  a  sketch  of  Keats's  profile, 


Plate  XIII 


^^ 


....^^ 


PAGE  FROM  A  LETTER  OF  BENJAMIN  ROBERT  HAYDON 
TO  ELIZABETH  BARRETT,   1834 


JOHN  HAMILTON  REYNOLDS  533 

with  an  answer  to  his  correspondent's  conjecture  that  the 
poet's  expression  had  been  Hoo  subtle  for  the  brush/ 

Among  Keats's  other  intimate  friends  and  associates, 
Mr  Taylor  let  Monckton  Milnes  have  the  loan  of  the 
notes  and  transcripts  bequeathed  him  by  Woodhouse, 
who  had  died  in  1834.  Reynolds  heard  by  accident  of  the 
intended  biography,  and  never  having  quite  abandoned 
his  own  purpose  in  the  matter,  wrote  at  first  com- 
plainingly,  resenting  that  use  should  be  made  of  those 
letters  of  Keats  to  himself  which  he  had  allowed  Wood- 
house  to  copy.  But  a  gracious  answer  quickly  won  him 
over,  and  he  made  the  new  biographer  welcome  to  all 
his  material.  His  own  career  had  been  a  rather  melan- 
choly failure.  He  had  never  quite  given  up  Hterature 
in  accordance  with  the  purpose  he  had  declared  on 
marriage.  Indeed  it  was  not  until  six  years  after  that 
declaration,  in  1825,  that  his  best  piece  of  work  was 
done,  in  collaboration  with  his  brother-in-law,  Thomas 
Hood:  I  mean  the  anonymous  volume  of  humorous 
poems,  not  inferior  to  Rejected  Addresses,  called  Odes  and 
Addresses  to  Great  People,  which  Coleridge  confidently 
declared  to  be  the  work  of  Lamb.  In  later  years 
Reynolds  was  a  not  infrequent  contributor  to  the 
Edinburgh  Review  and  to  the  Athenceum  under  the 
editorship  of  Dilke.  For  some  unspecified  reason  he 
did  not  prosper  in  the  place  which  his  friend  Rice  had 
found  for  him  with  the  eminent  firm  of  solicitors,  the 
Fladgates;  and  in  later  life  he  was  glad  to  accept  a 
small  piece  of  patronage  as  deputy  clerk  of  the  County 
Court  at  Newport  in  the  Isle  of  Wight.  Here,  if  the 
latest  mention  of  him  is  to  be  trusted,  he  fell  into  self- 
neglecting  habits  and  consequent  disrepute.^  In  one  of 
his  letters  to  Milnes  he  speaks  about  Hhat  poor,  obscure 
baffled  thing,  myself:  in  another  he  declares  his  entire 
confidence  in  his  correspondent,  and  his  unfading 
admiration  and  affection  for  his  lost  friend,  as  follows: — 

All  the  papers  I  possess — all  the  information  I  can  render — 
whatever  I  can  do  to  aid  your  kind  and  judiciously  intended  work 

*  See  Byron's  Collected  Works,  Prose,  iii,  46,  note. 


634  HASLAM,  SEVERN,  BAILEY 

— are  at  your  service !  But  a  word  or  two  on  the  great  subject 
of  our  correspondence.  He  was  hunted  in  his  youth,  before  he 
had  strength  to  escape  his  ban-dogs.  He  had  the  greatest  power 
of  poetry  in  him,  of  any  one  since  Shakespeare!  He  was  the 
sincerest  friend,  the  most  lovable  associate,  the  deepest  listener 
to  the  griefs  and  disappointments  of  all  around  him  'that  ever 
lived  in  the  tide  of  times.*  Your  expressed  intentions  as  to  the 
Life  are  so  clear  and  good;  that  I  seem  to  have  the  weight  of  an 
undone  work  taken  from  me. 

Haslam  in  like  manner  lends  all  the  help  he  can,  and 
from  his  office  as  a  solicitor  in  Copthall  Court  writes 
somewhat  dispiritedly  about  himself,  and  declares  that 
this  correspondence  ^has  been  a  clean  taking  me  back 
to  a  separate  state  of  existence  that  I  had  more  than 
thirty  years  ago,  a  state  that  has  long  appeared  to  me 
almost  as  a  dream.  The  realities  of  life  have  inter- 
vened, but  God  be  praised  they  have  but  been  laid  upon 
the  surface — ^have  but  hidden,  not  effaced  those  happy, 
happy  days.'  He  sends  a  number  of  letters  from  Severn, 
including  those  written  on  the  voyage  to  Naples  and 
quoted  in  full  above.  But  as  to  letters  from  Keats 
himself  says  he  has  found  none, — Hhey  probably  were 
so  well  or  intended  to  be  so  well  taken  care  of,  that 
every  endeavour  to  lay  my  hands  on  them  has  proved 
imavailing.'  One  wonders  whether  they  may  not  be 
lurking  yet,  a  forgotten  bundle,  in  the  dust  of  some 
unexplored  comer  of  a  safe  in  that  same  office.  Severn 
was  at  this  time  living  in  London,  and  some  correspon- 
dence passed  between  him  and  MHnes  about  the  bio- 
graphy, Severn's  chief  point  being  to  insist  that  not  the 
malice  of  the  critics,  but  the  Meath-stricken'  marriage 
project,  was  the  trouble  preying  upon  Keats  in  his  dying 
days,  and  that  the  outcries  of  his  delirium  ran  constantly 
upon  his  unfulfilled  love  and  unwritten  poems  together. 

As  to  yet  another  of  Keats's  closest  friends,  Benjamin 
Bailey,  Milnes  had  somehow  been  misinformed,  and 
believed  and  positively  stated  him  to  be  dead.  He  had 
in  fact  risen  to  colonial  preferment  in  the  Church,  and 
was  aJive  and  well  as  archdeacon  of  Colombo  in  Ceylon. 
Thence  on  the  appearance  of  Milnes's  book  he  wrote  to 


FLAWS  AND  SLIPS  IN  MILNES^S  WORK    535 

declare  his  survival,  and  forwarded  to  the  biographer, 
for  use  in  future  editions,  those  memoranda  of  old  days 
spent  in  Keats's  company  upon  which  I  have  above  (in 
Chapter  V)  so  fully  drawn. 

There  are  a  few  other  points  upon  which  Milnes's 
information  was  less  accurate  than  might  have  been 
expected.  He  assumes  that  the  fiancee  of  Keats's 
tragic  passion  was  identical  with  the  rich-complexioned 
Charmian  described  in  his  autumn  letters  of  1819,  and 
ignores  the  existence  of  Fanny  Brawne  and  of  her  family. 
One  would  have  supposed  that  he  must  have  heard  the 
real  story  both  from  Brown  and  from  Dilke,  whom  Mrs 
Brawne  had  appointed  trustee  for  her  children,  and  who 
had  not  since  lost  sight  of  them.  That  kind  lady  herself 
met  an  unhappy  fate,  biu-ned  to  death  upon  her  own 
doorstep.  Her  daughter  Fanny,  ten  years  after  her 
poet-lover's  death,  married  a  Mr  Lindo,  who  afterwards 
changed  his  name  to  Lindon,  and  of  whom  we  know 
little  except  that  he  was  at  one  time  drawn  into  the 
meshes  of  Spanish  politics  and  was  afterwards  one  of 
the  Commissioners  for  the  Great  Exhibition  of  1851. 
Not  long  before  her  marriage,  Mrs  Lindon  is  recorded  to 
have  said  of  Keats  that  the  kindest  thing  to  his  memory 
would  be  to  let  it  die.  Little  wonder,  perhaps,  that  she 
should  have  felt  thus,  when  she  remembered  the  tortured, 
the  terrifying  vehemence  of  his  passion  for  herself  and 
when,  being  probably  incapable  of  independent  hterary 
judgment,  she  saw  his  name  and  work  still  made 
customary  objects  of  critical  derision.  It  is  harder  to 
forgive  her  when  some  time  later  we  find  her  parting 
with  her  lover's  miniature,  under  pressure  of  some 
momentary  money  difficulty,  to  Dilke. 

Neither  does  the  biographer  seem  to  have  made  any 
attempt  to  get  into  touch  with  Keats's  young  sister,  who 
had  been  married  long  before  this  to  an  accomplished 
Spanish  man  of  letters,  Senor  Valentine  Llanos.  He  also 
was  at  various  times  involved  in  the  political  troubles 
of  his  country.  Of  his  and  his  wife's  children,  one 
attained  distinction  as  an  artist  and  assumed  the  name 


536  ITS  MERIT  AND  TIMELINESS 

/  of  Keats  y  Llanos.  Keats  had  written  to  his  sister  once 
as  a  child  gaily  prophesying  that  they  all,  her  brothers 
and  herself,  would  Hve  to  have  'tripple  chins  and  stubby 
thumbs/  She  in  fact  fully  attained  the  predicted 
length  of  days,  and  having  Hved  to  be  well  assured  of 
the  full  and  final  triumph  of  her  brother's  fame  died 
less  than  thirty  years  ago  at  eighty-six.  In  mature  life 
she  had  come  into  touch  with  one  at  least  of  her  brother's 
surviving  familiars,  that  is  with  Severn  at  Rome,  and 
with  more  than  one  of  his  admirers  in  a  younger  genera- 
tion. Of  these  a  good  friend  to  her  was  Mr  Buxton 
Forman,  through  whose  initiative  a  Civil  List  pension 
was  awarded  her  by  Lord  Beaconsfield.  A  subtle 
observer,  the  poet  and  himiorist,  Frederick  Locker- 
Lampson,  has  left  a  rather  disappointing  though  not 
unkindly  impression  of  her  as  follows: — 

Whilst  I  was  in  Rome  Mr  Severn  introduced  me  to  M.  and 
Mme.  Valentine  de  Llanos,  a  kindly  couple.  He  was  a  Spaniard, 
lean,  silent,  dusky,  and  literary,  the  author  of  Don  Esteban  and 
Sandoval.  She  was  fat,  blonde,  and  lymphatic,  and  both  were 
elderly.  She  was  John  Keats' s  sister  I  I  had  a  good  deal  of 
talk  with  her,  or  rather  at  her,  for  she  was  not  very  responsive. 
I  was  disappointed,  for  I  remember  that  my  sprightliness  made 
her  yawn;  she  seemed  inert  and  had  nothing  to  tell  me  of  her 
wizard  brother  of  whom  she  spoke  as  of  a  mystery — ^with  a  vague 
admiration  but  a  genuine  affection.  She  was  simple  and  natural 
— ^I  believe  she  is  a  very  worthy  woman. 

Gaps  and  errors  there  thus  were  not  a  few  in  Monckton 
Milnes's  book  when  it  appeared  in  two  volumes  in  1848. 
But  it  served  its  piupose  admirably  for  the  time  being, 
and  with  some  measure  of  revision  for  long  afterwards. 
Distinguished  in  style  and  perfect  in  temper,  the  preface 
and  introduction  struck  with  full  confidence  the  right 
note  in  challenging  for  Keats  the  character  of  Hhe 
Marcellus  of  the  Empire  of  EngHsh  song^*  while  the 
body  of  the  book,  giving  to  the  world  a  considerable, 
though  far  from  complete,  series  of  those  familiar  letters 
to  his  friends  in  which  his  genius  shines  almost  as  vividly 
as  in  his  verse,  established  on  full  evidence  the  essential 


ITS  RECEPTION  537 

manliness  of  his  character  against  the  conception  of  him 
as  a  blighted  weakling  which  both  his  friends  and  enemies 
had  contrived  to  let  prevail.  Among  the  posthimaous 
poems  printed  for  the  first  time,  the  two  longest,  Otho 
and  the  Cap  and  Bells  were  not  of  his  best,  but  master- 
pieces like  La  Belle  Dame  and  The  Eve  of  St  Mark, 
with  many  miscellaneous  things  of  high  interest,  were 
included.  The  reception  of  the  book,  though  not,  of 
course,  immixed,  was  in  all  quarters  respectful,  and  the 
old  tone  of  flippant  contempt  hardly  made  itself  heard 
at  all.  I  shall  quote  only  one  critical  dictum  on  its 
appearance,  and  that  is  the  letter  in  which  the  veteran 
Landor,  in  his  highest  style  of  urbanity  and  authority, 
acknowledged  a  copy  sent  him  by  the  author: — 

Dear  Milnes, 

On  my  return  to  Bath  last  evening,  after  six  weeks'  absence, 
I  find  your  valuable  present  of  Keatses  Works.  He  better  de- 
serves such  an  editor  than  I  such  a  mark  of  your  kindness.  Of 
all  our  poets,  excepting  Shakespeare  and  Milton,  and  perhaps 
Chaucer,  he  has  most  of  the  poetical  character — fire,  fancy,  and 
diversity.  ...  There  is  an  effluence  of  power  and  light  pervading 
all  his  works,  and  a  freshness  such  as  we  feel  in  the  glorious  dawn 
of  Chaucer. 

The  book  appeared  just  at  the  right  moment,  when 
the  mounting  enthusiasm  of  the  young  generation  for 
the  once  derided  poet  was  either  gradually  carrying  the 
elders  along  with  it  or  leaving  them  bewildered  behind. 
Do  readers  remember  how  the  simple  soul  of  Colonel 
Newcome  was  perplexed  by  the  talk  of  his  son  CUve  and 
of  CHve's  friends  ? — 

He  heard  opinions  that  amazed  and  bewildered  him:  he  heard 
that  Byron  was  no  great  poet,  though  a  very  clever  man  .  .  .  that 
his  favourite.  Doctor  Johnson,  talked  admirably,  but  did  not 
write  English;  that  young  Keats  was  a  genius  to  be  estimated 
in  future  days  with  young  Raphael;  and  that  a  young  gentleman 
of  Cambridge  who  had  lately  published  two  volumes  of  verses 
might  take  rank  with  the  greatest  poets  of  all.  Doctor  Johnson 
not  write  English!  Lord  Byron  not  one  of  the  greatest  poets 
of  the  world !  Sir  Walter  a  poet  of  the  second  order !  Mr  Pope 
attacked  for  inferiority  and  want  of  imagination;   Mr  Keats  and 


538  THE  PRE-RAPHAELITES 

this  young  Mr  Tennyson  of  Cambridge,  the  chief  of  modern 
poetic  literature!  What  were  these  new  dicta,  which  Mr  War- 
rington deHvered  with  a  puff  of  tobacco  smoke;  to  which  Mr 
Honeyman  blandly  assented,  and  Clive  listened  with  pleasure? 

Thackeray's  sketch  of  Clive  and  his  companions 
scarcely  suggests,  nor  was  it  meant  to  suggest,  the 
characteristics  of  the  special  group  of  young  artists  in 
whom,  almost  contemporaneously  with  the  appearance 
of  Milnes's  book,  the  enthusiasm  for  Keats  had  begim  to 
burn  at  its  whitest  heat.  I  refer  of  course  to  the  pre- 
RaphaeHte  brotherhood.  Of  the  three  leaders  of  that 
movement,  Holman  Hunt,  Millais,  and  Rossetti,  it  is 
hard  to  say  which,  in  the  late  'forties  and  early  'fifties, 
declared  himself  first  or  most  ardent  in  Keats-worship.^ 
Of  Hunt's  exhibited  pictures,  one  of  the  earliest  showed 
the  lovers  in  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes  stealing  past  the  sprawl- 
ing porter  and  the  sleeping  bloodhound  into  the  night; 
and  of  Millais's  earliest,  one  is  from  Isabella  or  the  Pot 
of  Basil,  showing  the  merchant  brothers  and  their  sister 
and  her  lover  at  a  meal  in  company  (the  well-known 
work,  so  queerly  designed  and  executed  with  so  much 
grip  and  character,  now  in  the  Walker  Art  Gallery  at 
Liverpool).  Rossetti  had  in  these  early  days  much  less 
technical  skill  and  training  than  either  of  his  two 
associates.  But  from  the  first  he  was  poet  as  well  as 
painter,  and  instinctively  and  spiritually  stood,  we  can 
well  discern,  much  nearer  to  Keats  than  they  did  for 
all  their  enthusiasm. 

Combining  Italian  blood  and  temperament  with  British 
upbringing,  Rossetti  added  to  his  inherited  and  paternally 
inculcated  knowledge  and  love  of  Dante  a  no  less  intense 
love  and  knowledge  of  English  romance  poetry,  both 
that  of  the  old  ballads  and  that  of  the  revival  of  1800 
and  onwards.  In  boyhood  and  early  youth  waves  of 
enthusiasm  for  different  recent  poets  had  swept  over 
him  one  after  another,  first  Shelley,  then  Keats,  then 
Browning;    but  Keats,   and  next  to  Keats  Coleridge, 

1  See  particularly  Chaps,  iv  and  v  of  Holman  Hunt's  Pre-Raphaelitism 
and  the  t^re^Raphaelite  Brotherhood. 


ROSSETTI  AND  MORRIS  539 

kept  the  strongest  and  deepest  hold  on  him.  When  his 
first  associates  Hunt  and  Millais  had  parted  from  him 
on  their  several,  widely  divergent  paths  of  pubUc  success 
and  distinction,  Rossetti  became,  in  the  comparative 
seclusion  in  which  he  chose  to  live,  a  powerful  focus  of 
romantic  inspiration  to  younger  men  who  came  about 
him.  He  is  reported  to  have  urged  upon  WiUiam 
Morris  that  he  should  become  a  painter  and  not  a  poet, 
seeing  that  Keats  had  already  done  all  there  was  to  be 
done  in  poetry.  Of  all  Keats's  poems,  it  was  La  belle 
dame  sans  Merci  and  The  Eve  of  St  Mark  which  most 
aroused  the  enthusiasm  of  Rossetti  and  his  group.  We 
have  already  seen  how  the  latter  fragment  stands  in  our 
nineteenth-century  poetry  as  a  kind  of  bridge  or  stepping- 
stone  between  Chaucer  and  Morris.  It  was  the  task  and 
destiny  of  Morris  as  a  writer  to  give,  by  his  abounding 
fertihty  and  brooding  delight  in  the  telling  of  Greek  and 
mediaeval  stories  in  verse,  the  most  profuse  and  for  the 
present  perhaps  the  last  expression  to  the  pure  romantic 
spirit  in  Enghsh  narrative  poetry:  and  to  this  effort 
Keats  had  given  him  the  immediate  impulse,  though 
Chaucer  was  his  ultimate  great  exemplar.  Answering  a 
congratulatory  letter  addressed  to  him  by  the  veteran 
Cowden  Clarke  on  the  pubHcation  of  the  first  volume  of 
the  Earthly  Paradise j  Morris  speaks  of  'Keats  for  whom 
I  have  such  a  boundless  admiration,  and  whom  I  venture 
to  call  one  of  my  masters.'  I  have  quoted  above  (page 
470)  his  emphatic  later  words  to  a  like  effect. 

While  the  leaven  was  thus  intensely  working  among  a 
special  group  in  England,  an  English  poetess  of  quite  other 
training  and  associations,  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning, 
paid  in  Aurora  Leigh  (1857)  her  weU-known  tribute  to 
Keats  in  lines  that  are  neither  good  as  poetry  nor 
accurate  as  fact,  but  in  their  chaotic  way  none  the  less 
passionately  felt  and  haunting: — 

By  Keats's  soul,  the  man  who  never  stepped 
In  gradual  progress  like  another  man, 
But,  turning  grandly  on  his  central  self. 
Ensphered  himself  in  twenty  perfect  years 


540   THE  BATTLE  WON:    LATER  CRITICS 

And  died,  not  young,  (the  life  of  a  long  life 
Distilled  to  a  mere  drop,  falling  like  a  tear 
Upon  the  world's  cold  cheek  to  make  it  bum 
For  ever;)  by  that  strong  accepted  soul, 
I  count  it  strange  and  hard  to  understand       J 
That  nearly  all  young  poets  should  write  old. 

Thus,  between  the  effects  of  Monckton  Milnes's  book 
and  the  enthusiasm  of  various  groups  of  university  men 
and  poets  and  artists,  the  previously  current  contempt 
for  Keats  was  from  soon  after  the  mid-century  practically 
silenced  and  the  battle  for  his  fame,  at  least  among  the 
younger  generation,  won.  He  has  counted  for  the  last 
sixty  years  and  more,  alike  in  England  and  in  America, 
as  an  imcontested  great  poet,  whose  works,  collected  or 
single,  have  been  in  demand  in  edition  after  edition. 
One  of  the  earliest  new  issues  was  that  edited  in  1850  by 
Monckton  Mihies,  who  continued  nearly  imtil  the  end, 
imder  his  new  style  as  Lord  Houghton,  to  further  by 
fresh  editions  and  revisions  the  good  work  he  had  begun. 
Not  only  every  professed  critic  and  historian  of  our 
poetry,  but  nearly  all  our  chief  poets  themselves,  as 
Aubrey  de  Vere,  James  Russell  Lowell,  Matthew  Arnold, 
Coventry  Patmore,  Swinburne,  and  latterly  the  present 
poet  laiu-eate,  have  been  in  various  tones  public  com- 
mentators on  Keats.  All  such  comments  have  shed 
Hght  upon  his  work  in  their  degree.  I  can  here  only 
touch  on  a  few  special  points  and  mention  in  their  order 
a  few  of  the  contributions  to  the  knowledge  or  appre- 
ciation of  the  poet  which  I  think  have  helped  the  most. 

One  point  to  be  remarked  is  that  very  few  judges  have 
seemed  able  to  care  equally  for  Keats  and  Shelley.  A 
special  devotion  to  Shelley,  the  poet  who  wedded  him- 
self in  youth  to  a  set  of  ready-made  beHefs  from  Godwin, 
of  which  the  chief  was  that  all  the  miseries  of  the  world 
were  due  to  laws  and  institutions  and  could  be  cured  by 
their  abolition,  who  clothed  these  abstract  beliefs  in 
imagery  of  clouds  and  winds  and  ocean-streams,  of  meteor 
and  rainbow  and  sunset  and  all  things  radiant  and 
evanescent,  and  sang  them  to  strains  of  music  inimitably 


KEATS  AND  SHELLEY  541 

swift  and  passionate,  seems  incompatible  with  complete 
delight  in  the  work  of  that  other  young  poet  who  could 
hold  fast  no  dogma  spiritual  or  social,  but  found  truth 
wherever  his  imagination  could  divine  or  create  Hving  and 
concrete  beauty,  and  who,  as  to  the  sorrows  of  the  world, 
was  convinced  that  they  were  inherent  in  its  very  fabric 
and  being,  and  yearned  for  knowledge  and  wisdom  to 
assuage  them  but  died  before  he  had  attained  clearness  or 
found  his  way.  As  between  these  two,  Tennyson's  final 
and  calm  opinion  is  quoted  by  his  son  as  follows: — ^ Keats 
would  have  become  one  of  the  very  greatest  of  all  poets  had 
he  Kved.  At  the  time  of  his  death  there  was  apparently 
no  sign  of  exhaustion  or  having  written  himself  out; 
his  keen  poetical  instinct  was  in  full  process  of  develop- 
ment at  the  time.  Each  new  effort  was  a  steady  advance 
on  that  which  had  gone  before.  With  all  Shelley's 
splendid  imagery  and  colour,  I  find  a  sort  of  tenuity  in 
lus  poetry.'  FitzGerald  was  much  stronger  on  the  same 
side,  counting  Shelley,  to  use  his  own  words,  as  not 
worth  Keats's  Httle  finger.  Matthew  Arnold,  who  has 
said  some  memorably  fme  and  just  things  about  Keats, 
behttles  the  poetry  of  Shelley  and  even  paradoxically 
prefers  the  prose  of  his  essays  and  letters  to  his  verse. 
With  ardent  Shelley-worshippers  on  the  other  hand  full 
appreciation  of  Keats  is  rare.  Swinburne,  for  one,  has 
done  Httle  for  Keats's  memory  by  the  torrent  of  hyper- 
bolical adjectives  of  alternate  praise  and  blame  which 
he  has  poured  upon  it.  Mr  William  Rossetti,  for  whom 
Shelley  is  'one  of  the  ultimate  glories  of  our  race  and 
planet,'  has  in  his  monograph  on  Keats,  as  I  think,  been 
icily  unjust  to  his  subject.  And  I  can  remember  my 
admirable  friend  and  colleague,  Mr  Richard  Garnett  of 
the  British  Museum,  taking  me  roundly  to  task  for  the 
opinion,  which  I  still  stoutly  hold,  that  the  letters  of 
Keats,  with  all  their  every-day  humanity  and  fun  and 
gossip,  are  in  their  wonderful  sudden  gleams  and  in- 
tuitions more  vitally  the  letters  of  a  poet  than  Shelley's. 
But  such  preferences  between  two  such  contrasted 
geniuses  and  creators  of  beauty  are  perhaps  inevitable, 


542  PITFALLS  AND  PREJUDICES 

and  have  at  any  rate  not  prevented  the  equal  and 
brotherly  association  of  the  two  in  the  memorial  house 
— ^the  house  in  which  Keats  died — ^lately  acquired  and 
consecrated  to  their  joint  fame  by  representative  English 
and  Americans  at  Rome. 

One  great  snare  in  judging  of  Keats  is  his  variability  of 
mood  and  opinion.  The  critic  is  apt  to  seize  upon  Jbhe 
expression  of  some  one  phase  or  attitude  of  Mind  that 
strikes  him,  and  to  theorize  and  draw  conclusions 
from  it  as  though  it  were  permanent  and  dominant. 
The  very  excellence  of  what  was  best  both  in  his  poetry 
and  himself  is  a  second  snare,  tempting  us  to  forget  that 
after  all  he  was  but  a  lad,  a  genius  and  character  not 
made  but  in  the  making.  A  third  is  the  obvious  and 
frankly  avowed  intensity  of  the  sensuous  elements  in 
his  nature.  But  the  critic  who  casts  these  up  against 
him  should  remember  that  it  took  the  same  capacity 
for  sense-delights  that  inspired  the  rhapsodies  on 
claret-drinking  and  nectarine-sucking  in  the  letters, 
to  inspire  also,  being  spiritualized  into  imaginative 
emotion,  the  'blushful  Hippocrene^  passage  in  the 
Nightingale  ode  or  the  feast  of  fruits,  in  all  its  pureness, 
of  the  revised  Hyperion)  and  also  that  Keats,  with 
his  clear  and  sane  seK-consciousness,  has  rarely  any 
doubt  that  the  master  bent  within  him  was  not  his 
'exquisite  sense  of  the  luxurious'  but  his  love  for  the 
high  things  and  thoughts  which  he  calls  'philosophy.' 

It  is  a  pity  that  the  author  of  the  one  full  and  recent 
history  of  our  poetry,  the  late  Mr  W.  J.  Courthope, 
should  have  been  debarred  from  just  appreciation  of 
this  poet  alike  by  adopted  dogma  and  by  natural  taste. 
Both  led  him  to  hold  that  the  true  power  of  poetry,  the 
true  test  by  which  posterity  must  judge  it,  lies  in  the 
direct  relations  which  it  bears  to  the  social  and  poHtical 
activities  of  its  period.  That  the  re-awakening  of  the 
Western  mind  and  imagination  to  nature  and  romance 
in  the  days  of  the  revolutionary  and  Napoleonic  wars 
was  a  spiritual  phenomenon  not  less  important  in 
human  history  than  the  wars  themselves  would  have 


ARNOLD  AND  PALGRAVE  543 

been  a  conception  that  his  mind  was  incapable  of 
entertaining.  He  supposed  that  Keats  was  indifferent 
to  history  or  pohtics.  But  of  history  he  was  in  fact 
an  assiduous  reader,  apd  the  secret  of  his  indifference 
to  pohtics,  so  far  as  it  existed,  was  that  those  of  his  own 
time  had  to  men  of  his  years  and  way  of  thinking  been 
a  disillusion, — that  the  saving  of  the  world  from  the 
grip  of  one  great  overshadowing  tyranny  had  but  ended 
in  re-instating  a  number  of  ancient  and  minor  tyrannies 
less  interesting  but  not  less  tyrannical.  To  that  which 
lies  behind  and  above  politics  and  history,  to  the  general 
destinies  and  tribulations  of  the  race,  he  was,  as  we  have 
seen,  not  indifferent  but  only  too  acutely  and  tragically 
sensitive. 

Tinning  to  the  chief  real  contributions  to  our  appre- 
ciation and  knowledge  of  Keats,  I  should  give  the  first 
place  to  Matthew  Arnold's  well-known  essay  ^  of  1880. 
With  his  cunning  art  in  the  minting  and  throwing  into 
circulation  of  phrases  that  cannot  be  forgotten,  Arnold 
balanced  the  weaknesses  against  the  strength  of  Keats's 
work  and  character,  blaming  the  gushing  admirers  who 
injured  his  memory  by  their  ^pawing  and  fondness/ 
insisting  on  the  veins  of  'flint  and  iron'  in  his  nature, 
insisting  on  his  clear-sightedness,  his  lucidity,  his  per- 
ception of  the  vital  connexion  of  beauty  with  truth  and 
of  both  with  joy,  declaring  that  'no  one  else  in  English 
poetry,  save  Shakespeare,  has  in  expression  quite  the 
fascinating  felicity  of  Keats,  his  perfection  of  loveh- 
ness,'  and  clenching  all,  with  reference  to  Keats's  own 
saying,  'I  think  I  shall  be  among  the  English  poets 
after  my  death,'  by  the  comment,  'he  is,  he  is  with 
Shakespeare.'  ^    Almost   simultaneously   with   Matthew 

*  First  published  in  T.  H.  Ward's  Selections  from  the  English  Poets,  and 
re-printed  in  the  second  series  of  Essays  in  Criticism  (1892).  To  this 
essay  I  possess  a  curious  postscript  in  a  note  of  Arnold's  written  a  few- 
years  later  to  myself.  I  had  thought  his  treatment  of  Endymion  too 
shghting.  His  answer  shows  how  fastidiousness  could  prevail  in  him  over 
judgment.  'If  Keats,'  he  writes,  'had  left  nothing  but  Endymion,  it 
would  have  alone  shown  his  remarkable  power  and  have  been  worth 
preserving  on  that  account:  but  when  he  has  left  plenty  which  shows 
it  much  better  I  cannot  but  wish  Endymion  away  from  his  volume/ 


544    MR  BUXTON  FORMAN  AND  OTHERS 

Arnold's  essay,  there  appeared  the  very  thoughtful  and 
original  study  of  Mrs  F.  M.  Owen,  in  which  were  laid 
the  foundations  of  a  true  understanding  of  Endymion 
as  a  parable  of  the  experiences  of  a  poet's  soul  in  its  quest 
after  Beauty. 

The  years  1883  and  1884  were  great  Keats  years.  In 
them  there  appeared  the  edition  of  the  poems  by  the 
late  W.  T.  Arnold,  the  first  which  contained  a  scholar's 
investigations  into  the  special  sources  of  Keats's  poetic 
style  and  vocabulary:  also  the  edition  for  the  Golden 
Treasury  Series  by  Francis  Turner  Palgrave,  with  a 
studiously  collated  text  and  a  preface  of  more  glowing 
and  scarcely  less  just  critical  admiration  than  Matthew 
Arnold's,  only  flawed,  as  I  think,  by  a  revival  of  that 
obsolete  heresy  of  the  'deadness'  of  the  Grecian  mytho- 
logy: and  thirdly,  the  first  issue  of  the  late  Mr  Buxton 
Forman's  edition  of  the  poetry  and  prose  works  together. 
All  students  know  the  results  of  this  editor's  devoted 
and  imremitting  industry,  maintained  through  a  full 
quarter  of  a  century,  in  the  textual  criticism  of  his 
author  and  in  the  publication  and  re-publication  of 
editions  containing  every  variant  reading  and  every 
scrap  of  scattered  prose  or  verse  that  could  be  recovered. 
To  the  same  worker  is  due  the  unearthing  and  giving  to 
the  world  of  two  groups  of  the  poet's  letters  which  had 
been  unknown  to  Monckton  Milnes,  the  wholly  admirable 
and  dehghtful  series  addressed  to  his  young  sister,  and 
the  series,  in  great  part  distressing  and  deplorable,  to 
Fanny  Brawne.  About  1887,  I  was  myself  able  to  put 
straight  two  matters  that  needed  it  by  publishing  the 
true  text  of  the  letters  to  America  and  by  rectifying  the 
current  notion  that  the  revised  Hyperion  had  been  a  first 
draft.  Before  long  came  the  essay  of  Mr  Robert  Bridges, 
passing  the  whole  of  Keats's  poetry  under  review,  and 
dealing  out  judgments  in  a  terse  authoritative  style  to 
which,  as  one  poet  estimating  another,  he  was  fully 
entitled,  and  which  at  all  moments  commands  interest 
and  respect  if  it  sometimes  challenges  contradiction.  On 
some  matters,  and  especially  on  the  relations  of  Keats's 


LATEST  EULOGISTS  545 

early  poetry  to  Wordsworth,  Mr  Bridges  has  thrown  a 
light  too  clear  and  convincing  to  be  questioned. 

When  in  1892  the  late  Mr  William  Sharp  compiled  his 
lAfe  of  Joseph  Severn  from  the  vast,  almost  unmanageable 
mass  of  papers  in  the  possession  of  the  artist's  family  (I 
had  had  them  previously  through  my  hands  and  can 
realize  the  difficulty  of  the  task),  he  furnished  valuable  new 
material  for  our  knowledge  both  of  the  life  of  Keats  and 
of  his  after  life  in  the  opinions  of  men.  Coming  down 
to  more  recent  years,  we  have  the  admirable  editorial 
work  of  Professor  de  Selincourt,  as  good,  I  think,  as 
has  been  bestowed  on  any  English  poet,  carrjdng  out 
to  the  farthest  point  the  researches  initiated  by  W.  T. 
Arnold,  and  illuminating  the  text  throughout  with  the 
comments  and  illustrations  of  a  keen  scholar  in  classical 
and  EngHsh  Hterature.  Nor  can  I  leave  immentioned 
the  several  lectures  by  two  successive  Oxford  professors 
of  poetry,  that  of  Mr  A.  C.  Bradley  on  Keats's  letters 
and  that  of  Mr  J.  W.  Mackail  on  his  poetry.  From 
these  two  minds,  ripened  in  daily  familiarity  with  the 
best  literatures  of  the  world,  we  have,  after  a  himdred 
years,  praise  of  Keats  which  almost  makes  Shelley's 
seating  of  him  among  'Inheritors  of  unfulfilled  renown' 
seem  like  an  irony, — ^praise  more  splendid  than  he  would 
have  hoped  for  had  he  lived  to  fulfil  even  the  most  daring 
of  his  ambitions.  A  special  point  in  Mr  Mackail's  work 
is  to  make  clear  how  strong  had  been  upon  Keats 
the  influence  of  the  Divine  Comedy,  his  pocket  com- 
panion on  his  Scottish  tour,  and  how  in  Hyperion, 
written  in  the  next  months  after  his  retiim,  there  appears 
here  and  there,  amid  the  general  Miltonic  strain  of  the 
verse,  a  quality  of  thought  and  vision  drawn  straight 
from  and  almost  matching  Dante.  Lastly,  there  has 
recently  come  from  America  a  tribute  of  quite  another 
kind,  showing  how  for  purposes  of  systematic  study 
Keats  has  been  thought  worthy  of  an  apparatus  hitherto 
only  bestowed  on  the  great  classics  of  literature:  I 
refer  to  the  elaborate  and  monumental  Concordance  tO 
his  poems  lately  issued  from  Cornell  University, 


546     RISKS  TO  PERMANENCE  OF  FAME 

And  must  not,  it  may  be  asked,  all  this  labour  spent 
upon  Keats^s  memory  and  remains,  all  this  load  of 
editing  and  re-editing  and  commentary  and  biography 
and  scholiast-work  laid  upon  a  poet  who  declared  that 
all  poems  ought  to  be  understood  without  any  comment, 
— ^must  it  not  by  this  time  have  fairly  smothered,  or  is 
it  not  at  least  in  danger  of  smothering,  Keats  himself 
and  his  poetry  ?  Naturally  in  the  course  of  my  own  work 
I  have  asked  myself  this  question  with  qualms,  be- 
thinking myself  of  Tennyson's  phrase  about  swamping 
the  sacred  poets  with  themselves.  The  answer  is, — No, 
such  a  poet  can  carry  any  weight  we  may  choose  to  lay 
upon  him,  and  more:  he  can  never  be  smothered, 
inasmuch  as  he  has  both  given  the  world  something 
it  can  nevermore  cease  to  want  and  suggested  the 
existence  within  him  of  a  power,  quenched  before 
its  time,  to  give  it  something  much  more  and 
greater  yet.  If  the  result  of  all  our  commentaries 
should  be  to  provoke  a  reaction  among  readers,  and  to 
make  them  crave  for  a  naked  text  both  of  the  poems 
and  letters  and  insist  upon  being  left  alone  with  that 
and  their  own  meditations  upon  it, — ^well,  so  much  the 
better.  Every  reader  of  the  English  tongue  that  has 
the  works  of  Keats  often  enough  in  his  hands,  with  or 
without  comment,  will  find  his  life  enriched  with  much 
of  the  best  that  poetry  can  do  for  human  life,  with 
achievements,  very  near  to  perfection,  of  that  faculty 
which  is  the  essential  organ  of  poetry, — ^to  which  all 
others,  spiritual  and  intellectual,  are  in  poetry  sub- 
ordinate,— ^the  faculty  of  imagination  transfusing  the 
vital  beauty  and  magic  and  secret  rhythm  of  things 
into  the  other  magic  and  beauty  and  rhythm  of  words. 
Over  and  above  this,  he  wiU  find  himself  living  in  the 
familiarity  of  a  great  and  lovable  spirit,  dowered  at 
birth  with  capacities  for  joy  and  misery  more  intense 
ahnost  than  any  of  which  we  have  record,  and  retain- 
ing its  lovableness  to  the  last  in  spite  of  circxmistances 
that  gave  misery  too  cruelly  the  upper  hand. 

But,  again  the  objector  may  ask,  is  it  so  certain  that 


HIS  WILL  CONQUER  547 

in  the  coming  time  the  desire  of  readers  for  what  Keats 
has  to  give  them  will  survive  without  abatement? 
Have  not  the  last  three  years  been  an  utterly  unpre- 
cedented, overwhelming  and  transforming  experience 
for  mankind  ?  Will  not  the  new  world  after  the  war  be 
a  new  world  indeed,  on  the  one  hand  filled,  nay,  gorged, 
with  recollections  of  doing  and  undergoing,  of  endurance 
and  adventiu"e,  of  daring  and  suffering  and  horror,  of 
hellishness  and  heroism;  beside  which  all  the  dreams  of 
bygone  romance  must  forever  seem  tame  and  vapid; 
and  on  the  other  hand  straining  with  a  hungry  forecast 
towards  a  future  of  peace  and  justice  such  as  mankind  has 
not  known  before,  which  it  will  be  its  tremendous  task  to 
try  and  establish  ?  Will  not  this  world  of  so  prodigiously 
intensified  experiences  and  enlarged  hopes  and  besetting 
anxieties  require  and  produce  new  poets  and  a  new 
poetry  of  its  own  that  shall  deal  with  the  reahties  it  has 
gone  through  and  those  it  is  striving  for,  and  put  away 
and  cease  to  care  for  the  old  dreams  and  thrills  and 
glamours  of  romance?  Have  we  not  in  fact  witnessed 
the  first-fruits  of  this  new  tremendous  stimulus  in  the 
cloud  of  young  poets  who  have  appeared — too  many  of 
them  alas !  only  to  perish — ^since  the  war  began  ? 

And  again  the  answer  is.  No.  However  changed  the 
world,  work  like  that  of  Keats  is  not  what  it  will  ever 
let  perish.  The  thrills  and  glamours  which  pass  away 
are  only  those  of  the  second-rate  and  the  second-hand 
sort  that  come  in  and  go  out  with  literary  fashion;  not 
those  which  have  sprung  from  and  struck  deep  into  the 
innermost  places  of  the  spirit.  Doubtless  there  will  arise 
and  is  arising  a  new  poetry  which  will  be  very  different 
from  any  phase  of  poetry  produced  by  the  romantic 
revolution  and  the  generations  that  followed  and  nour- 
ished themselves  on  it.  The  new  poetry  may  not  be 
able  fully  to  share  Keats's  inspiring  conviction  of  the 
sovereign,  the  transcendental  truth  of  whatsoev^er  ideas 
the  imagination  seizes  as  beauty.  It  may  perhaps 
even  abjure  the  direct  search  for  beauty  as  its  primary 
aim  and  impulse.    But  no  matter:    provided  that  its 


548  YOUTH  AND  ITS  STORMS 

organ  be  the  imagination,  working  with  intensity  on 
whatever  themes  the  genius  of  the  age  may  dictate,  it 
cannot  but  achieve  some  phase,  some  incarnation,  of 
beauty  by  the  way.  But  gains  Hke  those  which  were 
made  for  the  human  spirit  by  the  poetry  of  which  Keats 
was  one  of  the  chief  masters  will  never  be  lost  again. 
Those  who  care  for  poetry  at  all  must  always  care  for 
those  refreshing  and  inspiring  draughts,  as  I  have  called 
them,  from  the  innermost  wells  of  antiquity,  of  nature, 
and  of  romance,  those  meditations  of  mingled  joy  and 
sorrow  that  search  into  the  soul  of  things.  Moreover 
Hhey  will  never  cease  to  interest  themselves  in  the 
question, — If  only  this  great  spirit  had  survived,  what 
would  have  been  those  unwritten  poems  of  which  he 
saw  in  the  sky  the  cloudy  symbols,  of  which  he  felt  the 
pressure  and  prescience  forcing  the  blood  into  his  brain 
or  bringing  about  his  heart  an  awful  warmth  'like  a 
load  of  immortality,'  and  the  perishing  of  which  unborn 
within  him  was  one  of  the  two  great  haunting  distresses 
of  his  dying  days  ? 

In  letting  speculation  wander  in  this  field,  we  are 
brought  up  by  many  problems  as  to  what  kind  of  man- 
hood could  have  followed  a  youth  like  that  of  Keats, 
had  he  had  better  fortune  and  had  the  conditions  and 
accidents  of  his  life  been  such  as  to  fortify  his  bodily 
constitution  instead  of  sapping  it.  Youth,  especially 
half-trained  youth,  is  always  subject  to  such  storms 
and  strains  as  those  which  Keats  experienced  with  a 
violence  proportionate  to  the  fervour  of  his  being.  To 
the  sane  and  sweet,  the  manly  and  courageous,  elements  in 
his  character  we  have  found  his  friends  bear  unanimous 
evidence,  amply  supported  by  the  self -revelation  of  his 
letters.  But  self-revealed  also  we  see  the  morbid,  the 
corroding  elements  which  lay  beneath  these,  just  as 
beneath  his  vigorous  frame  and  gallant  bearing  there 
lay  the  bodily  susceptibilities  that  with  ill-luck  enabled 
lung  disease  to  fasten  on  and  kill  him.  What  must  under 
any  conditions  have  made  life  hard  for  him  was  the 
habitual  inner  contention  and  disquiet  of  his  instincts 


THE  MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN  549 

and  emotions  in  regard  to  that  most  momentous  of 
human  matters,  love.  When  he  lets  his  mind  dwell  on 
the  opposed  extremes  of  human  impulse  and  experience, 
from  the  vilest  to  the  most  exalted,  which  the 
word-of-all-work,  love,  is  used  to  cover,  he  is  more 
savagely  perplexed  and  out  of  conceit  with  life  than 
from  any  other  cause  or  thought  whatever.^  The  ruling 
power  in  himself,  as  he  declares  over  and  over  again, 
was  the  abstract  passion  for  beauty,  the  love  of  the 
principle  of  beauty  in  all  things.  But  even  in  the  poem 
specially  designed  to  embody  and  celebrate  that  passion, 
in  Endymion,  we  find  his  conception  of  reahzed  and 
sexual  human  love  to  be  mawkish  and  unworthy. 
When  the  actual  experience  befalls  himself,  he  falls 
utterly  and  almost  ignominiously  a  slave,  at  once  en- 
raptured and  desperately  resentful,  to  the  jealous  crav- 
ings which  absorb  and  paralyse  all  his  other  faculties. 
Would  ripened  manhood  or  a  happier  experience  have 
been  able  to  bring  health  and  peace  to  his  spirit  on  this 
supremely  vital  matter  and  to  turn  him  into  a  poet  of 
love,  love  both  human  and  transcendental,  such  as  at  the 
outset  he  had  longed  and  striven  to  be? 

Again,  along  with  his  admirable  capacity  for  loyal 
devotion  and  sympathy  in  friendship,  we  find  in  him 
capacities  of  quite  another  kind,  capacities  for  dis- 
illusionment and  for  seeing  through  and  chafing  at 
human  and  social  shams  and  pretensions  and  absurdities; 
and  we  ask  ourselves,  would  this  strain  in  him,  which 
we  find  expressed  with  a  degree  of  pettish  and  prematm-e 
cynicism,  for  instance  in  the  Cap  and  Bells  and  in  some 
of  his  later  letters,  have  matured  with  time  into  a  power 
either  of  virile  satire  or  genial,  reconciling  comedy? 

And  once  more,  would  that  haunting,  that  irrepres- 
sible sense  of  the  miseries  of  the  world  which  we  find 
breaking  through  from  time  to  time  amid  the  beauty 

*  See  the  bitter  comment  on  a  passage  in  Burton's  Anatomy  quoted  in 
Mr  Buxton  Forman's  Complete  Works  of  J.  K.  iii,  268,  where  Keats  runs 
his  head  against  the  problem  with  which  Plato  had  tried  to  deal  in  his 
myth  of  the  two  Aphrodites,  Pand^mos  and  Urania.  '  The  word-of-all-work, 
love,'  is  a  phrase  of  George  Eliot's. 


550  GUESSES  AND  A  CERTAINTY 

of  the  odes,  or  the  playfulness  and  affectionate 
confidences  of  the  letters,  or  dictating  that  tragical 
return  against  himself  and  his  achievements  in  the 
revised  Hyperioriy — could  it  and  would  it  with  experience 
have  mellowed  into  such  compassionate  wisdom  as  might 
have  made  him  one  of  the  rare  great  healers  and  sages 
among  the  poets  of  the  world  ? 

Such  speculations  are  as  vain  as  they  are  inevitable. 
Let  us  indulge  ourselves  at  any  rate  by  remembering 
that  it  is  the  greatest  among  his  successors  who  have 
held  the  most  sanguine  view  as  to  the  powers  that  were 
in  him.  Here  are  more  words  of  Tennyson's, — 'Keats, 
with  his  high  spiritual  vision,  would  have  been,  if  he  had 
lived,  the  greatest  of  us.  There  is  something  magic  and 
of  the  innermost  soul  of  poetry  in  almost  everything 
which  he  wrote/  Leaving  with  these  words  the  question 
of  what  he  might  have  done,  and  looking  only  at  what 
he  did,  it  is  enough  for  any  man's  glory.  The  days  of 
the  years  of  his  life  were  few  and  evil,  but  above  his 
grave  the  double  aureole  of  poetry  and  friendship  shines 
eternally. 


APPENDIX 

I.  The  Alexander  fragment  (page  33).    Here  is  the  text: — 

Whenne  Alexandre  the  Conqueroure  was  wayfayringe  in  y" 
londe  of  Inde,  there  mette  hym  a  damoselle  of  marveillouse 
beautie  slepynge  uponne  the  herbys  and  flourys.  He  colde  ne  loke 
uponne  her  withouten  grete  plesance,  and  he  was  welle  nighe 
loste  in  wondrement.  Her  forme  was  everyche  whytte  lyke  y« 
fayrest  carvynge  of  Quene  Cythere,  onlie  thatte  y*  was  swellyd 
and  blushyd  wyth  warmthe  and  lyffe  wythalle. 

Her  forhed  was  as  whytte  as  ys  the  snowe  whyche  y«  talle  hed 
of  a  Norwegian  pyne  stelythe  from  y«  northerne  wynde.  One 
of  her  fayre  hondes  was  yplaced  thereonne,  and  thus  whytte 
wyth  whytte  was  ymyngld  as  y®  gode  Arthure  saythe,  lyke  whytest 
lylys  yspredde  on  whyttest  snowe;  and  her  bryght  eyne  whenne 
she  them  oped,  sparklyd  lyke  Hesperus  through  an  evenynge 
cloude. 

Theye  were  yclosyd  yn  slepe,  save  that  two  slauntynge  raies 
shotte  to  her  mouthe,  and  were  theyre  bathyd  yn  sweetenesse, 
as  whenne  by  chaunce  y®  moone  fyndeth  a  banke  of  violettes  and 
droppethe  thereonne  y®  silverie  dewe. 

The  authoure  was  goynge  onne  withouthen  descrybynge  y« 
ladye's  breste,  whenne  lo,  a  genyus  appearyd — 'Cuthberte/ 
sayeth  he,  'an  thou  canst  not  descrybe  y«  ladye's  breste,  and 
fynde  a  simile  thereimto,  I  forbyde  thee  to  proceede  yn  thy 
romaunt.'  Thys,  I  kennd  fulle  welle,  far  smT)assyd  my  feble 
powres,  and  forthwythe  I  was  fayne  to  droppe  my  quille. 

This  queer  youthful  passage  in  a  would-be  Caxton  or  Wynkyn 
de  Worde  spelling  seems  scarcely  worth  taking  trouble  about, 
but  I  thought  it  worth  while  to  try  and  trace  what  reading  Keats 
must  have  been  fresh  from  when  he  wrote  it,  and  consulted  both 
Prof.  Israel  GoUancz  and  Mr  Henry  Bradley,  with  the  result 
stated  briefly  in  the  text.  At  first  I  had  thought  Keats  must 
have  drawn  his  idea  from  some  one  of  the  many  versions  of  the 

551 


552  APPENDIX 

great  mediseval  Alexander  romance — especially  considering  that 
in  all  forms  of  that  romance  a  flight  into  the  skies  and  a  trip  under 
the  sea  are  regular  incidents,  and  might  later  have  suggested 
the  parallel  incidents  in  Endymion.  But  neither  in  the  version 
which  Keats  is  most  likely  to  have  known,  the  English  Alisaunder 
as  published  in  Weber's  collection  of  metrical  romances,  1810, 
nor  indeed,  I  believe,  in  any  other,  is  there  any  incident  closely 
parallel  to  this  of  the  Indian  maiden;  although  love  and 
marriage  generally  come  into  the  story  towards  the  close.  In 
the  English  version  there  is  a  beautiful  Candace  who  declares 
her  passion  for  the  hero:  he  puts  her  off  for  the  time  being, 
but  goes  disguised  as  an  ambassador  to  her  court,  where  he  is 
recognized  and  imprisoned.  Among  things  derived  from  the 
main  mediaeval  cycle,  the  nearest  approach  to  such  an  idea  as 
Keats  was  working  on  is  to  be  found  in  the  Orlando  Innamorato 
of  Boiardo,  book  ii,  canto  i,  stanzas  6,  21-29;  but  here  the 
beauty  is  a  lady  of  Egypt  whom  Boiardo  calls  Elidonia.  His 
description  of  the  great  painted  hall  of  the  giant  Agramante  at 
Biserta,  adorned  with  pictures  of  the  life  and  deeds  of  Alexander, 
closes  with  the  following: — 

In  somma,  ogni  sua  guerra  ivi  e  dipinta 
Con  gran  richezza  e  bella  a  riguardare. 

Poscia  che  fu  la  terra  da  lui  vinta, 
A  due  grifon  nel  ciel  si  fe  portare. 

Col  scudo  in  braccia  e  con  la  spada  cinta; 

Poi  dentro  un  vetro  si  cala  nel  mare,  ' 

E  vede  le  balene  e  ogni  gran  pesce 

E  campa  e  ancor  quivi  di  fuor  n'esce. 

Da  poi  che  vinto  egli  ha  ben  ogni  cosa, 

Vedesi  lui  che  vinto  h  dalP  amore, 
Perch^  Elidonia,  quella  graziosa, 

Co'  suoi  begli  occhi  gli  ha  passato  il  core — 


And  then  ensues  the  history  of  their  loves  and  of  the  hero's 
death. 

But  Keats  in  his  hospital  days  knew  no  Italian,  and  could 
only  have  heard  of  such  a  passage  in  Boiardo  through  Leigh  Hunt. 
So  I  think  the  derivation  of  his  fragment  from  any  of  the  regular 
Alexander  romances  must  be  given  up,  and  the  source  indicated 
in  the  text  be  accepted,  namely  the  popular  fabliau  of  the  Lai 
d'Aristote  (probably  in  Way's  rimed  version),  where  the  thing 
happens  exactly  as  Keats  tells  it,  and  whence  the  idea  of  the 
sudden  encounter  with  an  Indian  maiden  probably  lingered  in  his 


APPENDIX  553 

mind  till  he  revived  it  in  Endymion.  As  for  the  sources  of  the 
attempt  at  voluptuous  description,  it  is  a  little  surprising  to  find 
Milton's  *  tallest  pine  hewn  on  Norwegian  hills'  remembered  in 
such  a  connexion:  other  things  are  an  easily  recognizable  farrago 
from  Cymbeline, — 

'  Cy  therea, 
How  bravely  thou  becomest  thy  bed,  fresh  lily. 
And  whiter  than  the  sheets ! ' 
from  Venus  and  Adonis, — 

*  A  lily  prison'd  in  a  gaol  of  snow;' 
'Teaching  the  sheets  a  whiter  hue  than  white;* 
from  Lucrece, — 

— 'the  morning's  silver -melting  dew;' 
from  Twelfth  Night, 

— '  like  the  sweet  sound 
That  breathes  upon  a  bank  of  violets;' 

and  so  forth.  Prof.  Gollancz  suggests  that  'Cuthberte'  as  the 
name  of  the  author  is  a  reminiscence  from  the  'Cuddie'  of 
Spenser's  Shepheard's  Calendar,  and  that  the  'good  Arthure' 
may  also  be  some  kind  of  Spenserian  reference:  but  I  suspect 
'Arthure'  here  to  be  a  mis-transcription  (we  have  no  autograph) 
for  'authoure.' 


II.  Verses  written  by  Brown  and  Keats  after  visiting  Beauty 
Abbey  (p.  295). — ^The  text,  of  which  there  exist  two  separate 
transcripts,  is  as  follows.  I  have  printed  in  italics  the  lines 
which  Keats,  as  he  told  Woodhouse,  contributed  to  the  joint 
work. 

On  Some  Skulls  in  Beauly  Abbey,  near  Inverness 

I  shed  no  tears; 
Deep  thought  or  awful  vision,  I  had  none 
By  thousand  petty  fancies  I  was  crossed. 

Wordsworth, 

And  mocked  the  dead  bones  that  lay  scattered  by. 

Shakspeare. 

1 

In  silent  barren  Synod  met 

Within  these  roofless  walls,  where  yet 

The  shafted  arch  and  carved  fret 

Cling  to  the  Ruin 
The  Brethren's  Skulls  mourn,  dewy  wet, 

Their  Creed's  undoing. 


554  APPENDIX 


The  mitred  ones  of  Nice  and  Trent 
Were  not  so  tongue-tied, — no,  they  went 
Hot  to  their  Councils,  scarce  content 

With  Orthodoxy 
But  ye,  poor  tongueless  things,  were  meant 

To  speak  by  proxy. 

3 

Your  Chronicles  no  more  exist 
Since  Knox,  the  Revolutionist 
Destroyed  the  work  of  every  fist 

That  scrawlM  black  letter 
Well !  I'm  a  Craniologist 

And  may  do  better. 


This  skull-cap  won  the  cowl  from  sloth 
Or  discontent,  perhaps  from  both 
And  yet  one  day,  against  his  oath 

He  tried  escaping 
For  men,  tho'  idle  may  be  loth 

To  live  on  gaping. 

5 

A  Toper  this !  he  plied  his  glass 
More  strictly  than  he  said  the  Mass 
And  lov'd  to  see  a  tempting  lass 

Come  to  Confession 
Letting  her  absolution  pass 

O'er  fresh  transgression. 

6 

This  crawPd  thro'  life  in  feebleness 

Boasting  he  never  knew  excess 

Cursing  those  crimes  he  scarce  could  guess 

Or  feel  but  faintly 
With  prayer  that  Heaven  would  cease  to  bless 

Men  so  unsaintly. 

7 

Here's  a  true  Churchman !  he'd  aflfect 
Much  charity  and  ne'r  neglect 
To  pray  for  Mercy  on  th'  elect 


APPENDIX  555 

But  thought  no  evil 
In  sending  Heathen,  Turk  and  Scot 
All  to  the  Devil ! 


8 

Poor  Skull .'     Thy  fingers  set  ablaze, 
With  silver  saint  in  golden  rays. 
The  Holy  Missal,  thou  didst  craze 

'Mid  bead  and  spangle 
While  others  passed  their  idle  days 

In  coil  and  wrangle, 

9 

Long  time  this  sconce  a  helmet  wore, 
But  sickness  smites  the  conscience  sore. 
He  broke  his  sword  and  hither  bore 

His  gear  and  plunder 
Took  to  the  cowl — then  rav'd  and  swore 

At  his  damn'd  blunder  I 


10 

This  lily-coloured  skull  with  all 

The  teeth  complete,  so  white  and  small 

Belonged  to  one  whose  early  pall 

A  lover  shaded. 
He  died  ere  Superstition's  gall 

His  heart  invaded. 


11 

Ha !  here  is  *undivulged  crime  I' 
Despair  forbad  his  soul  to  climb 
Beyond  this  world,  this  mortal  time 

Of  fevered  badness 
Until  this  Monkish  Pantomime 

Dazzled  his  madness ! 

12 

A  younger  brother  this !  a  man 
Aspiring  as  a  Tartar  Khan 
But,  curbed  and  baffl'd  he  began 

The  trade  of  frightening 
It  smack'd  of  power !  and  how  he  ran 

To  deal  Heaven's  lightning  I 


556  APPENDIX 

13 

This  idiot-skull  belonged  to  one, 
A  buried  miser's  only  son 
Who,  penitent  ere  he'd  begun 

To  taste  of  pleasure 
And  hoping  Heaven's  dread  wrath  to  shun 
)  Gave  Hell  his  treasure. 


14 

Here  is  the  forehead  of  an  Ape 

A  robber's  mask — and  near  the  nape 

That  bone — fie  on't,  bears  just  the  shape 

Of  carnal  passion 
Ah !  he  was  one  for  theft  and  rape 

In  Monkish  fashion  I 

15 

This  was  the  Porter ! — he  could  sing 
Or  dance,  or  play — do  anything 
And  what  the  Friars  bade  him  bring 

They  ne'er  were  balked  of; 
Matters  not  worth  remembering 

And  seldom  talk'd  of. 

16 

Enough !  why  need  I  further  pore? 
This  corner  holds  at  least  a  score, 
And  yonder  twice  as  many  more 

Of  Reverend  Brothers, 
'Tis  the  same  story  o'er  and  o'er 

They're  like  the  others  I 

III.  List  of  Books  in  Keats^s  Library  compiled  by  Richard  Wood- 
house. — This  list,  of  great  interest  to  all  students  of  Keats,  is  in 
the  possession  of  Mr  J.  P.  Morgan,  to  whom  I  am  much  indebted 
for  allowing  it  to  be  transcribed  for  my  use.  I  give  it  verbatim, 
without  attempting  (though  it  would  be  an  attractive  biblio- 
graphical exercise)  to  identify  particular  editions. 

Wordsworth's  Poems 

Fairfax's  Tasso  5  „      1     „  bound 

Petrarch's  Sonnets  and  Odes 

Hazlitt's  Principles  of  Human  action 

Drayton's  Poems  (Edn.  Jno.  Smethwick) 

Chaucer's  Poems 


8vo 

2  Vol 

if 

1     „ 

ii 

1     tt 

it 

1     „ 

ft 

1     „ 

12mo  7     „ 

APPENDIX 

557 

Hunt's  Descent  of  Liberty 

8vo    IVoI. 

Dante's  Inferno  by  Carey 

„      2     , 

,    bound 

Herrick's  Poems 

„      1     , 

Burton's  Anat.  of  Melancholy 

„      2     , 

,    bound 

Aikin's  History  of  the  year 

12mo  1     , 

,     bound 

Potter's  Grecian  Antiqs 

8vo    2     , 

Adam's  Roman  L 

„      1     , 

Davies'  Celtic  Researches 

„      1     , 

Spelman's  Xenophon 

„      1     , 

,     bound 

Vertot's  Roman  Revolutions  (F) 

„      3     , 

,     bound 

Lady  Russell's  Letters 

12mo  2     , 

Bacon's  Essays 

„      1     , 

Boyle's  Reflections 

„      1     , 

Cowley's  Essays 

„      1     , 

Locke's  Conduct 

„      1     , 

Clarendon's  Essays 

„      1     , 

Bacon's  Essays 

8vo    1     , 

,    bound 

French  Prayer  Book 

18mo  1     , 

,     bound 

Erasmus'  Moriae  Encomium 

36mo  1     , 

,     bound 

French  Rabelais 

12mo  1     , 

,     bound 

Ovid's  Metamorphoses 

18mo  1     , 

Ariosto  da  Boschino 

„      6     , 

J 

Coleridge,  Lamb  and  Lloyd 

8vo    1     , 

,    bound 

Prayer  Book 

folio    1     , 

,    bound 

Southwell's  Bible 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Chaucer  (black  Letter) 

„      1     , 

Levy's  Roman  History  (1686) 

»      1     , 

,    bound 

Auctores  Mythographi  Latini 

4to    1     , 

,    bound 

Siecle  de  Louis  XIV  (Voltaire) 

12mo  5     , 

Raleigh's  Hist,  of  the  World 

folio    1     , 

,     bound 

Guzman  d'Alfarache 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Les  Oeuvres  d'Amboise 

„      1     , 

,     bound 

Ciceronis  Oationes 

8vo    1     , 

,    bound 

Lempriere's  Class.  Diet. 

„      1     , 

An  Atlas 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Ben  Johnson  &  Beaumont  &  Fletcher 

„      4     , 

Rime  di  Petrarcha 

12mo  1     , 

,    bound 

Ainsworth's  Diet. 

8vo    1     , 

,    bound 

Z.  Jackson's  lUus.  of  Shakespeare 

„      1     , 

Carew,  Suckling,  Prior,  Congreve,  Black- 

more,  Fenton,  Granville  and  Maiden 

,,      1     , 

,    bound 

Ovidii  Met^morphoseon 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Bailey's  Dictionary 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Hunt's  Juvenilia 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

Fencing  familiarized 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

558 


APPENDIX 


Aminta  di  Tasso 

Burton  (abridged) 

Poetae  minores  Graeci 

Greek  Grammar 

Terentii  Comedia 

Bishop  Beveridge^s  Works 

Old  Plays  (5th  Vol.  with  Reynolds) 

Bible 

Conducteur  a  Paris 

Horatii  Opera 

Burns's  Poems 

Mickle's  Lusiad 

Palmerin  of  England 

Vocabulaire  Italien  Franc 

Baldwin's  Pantheon 

Oeuvres  de  Moliere 

Diet.  Phil,  de  Voltaire 

Essai  sur  les  Moeurs  de  do. 

Nouv.  Heloise  (Rousseau) 

Emile  (Rousseau) 

Description  des  Antiques 

Spectator  (1st  lost) 
Shakespeare  (6th  lost) 
Marmontel's  Incas  (3rd  lost) 
Hist,  of  K.  Arthur  (2nd  lost) 
Odd  Vol.  of  Spencer — damaged 


12mo  1  Vol.  bound 

8vo    1     , 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

,,      1     , 

,    bound 

,,      1     , 

,    bound 

„      6     , 

12mo  1     , 

,    bound 

„      1     , 

,,      1     , 

,    bound 

18mo  1     , 

,    bound 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

8vo    4     , 

,    bound 

„      1     , 

,    bound 

,,      1     , 

,    bound 

12mo  6     , 

„    14     , 

„      8     , 

„      4     , 

„      3    , 

8vo    1     , 

„      7     , 

,    bound 

12mo  7     , 

„      2     , 

,    bound 

ISmo  1     , 

Names  of  friends  to  whom  Keats  had  either  given  or  lent 
certain  works. 


1  Mr  B.  Bailey 

10  Miss  Keats 

2  Mrs  Brawne 

11  Mrs  Jones 

3  Mr  S.  Brawne 

12    „     Mancur 

4     „  Browne 

13    „     Reynolds 

5     „  Clark 

14    „     Rice 

6     „  Dilke 

15    „     Richards 

7     „  Haslam 

16    „     Severn 

8     „  Hessey 

17    „    Taylor 

9     „  Hunt 

18    „    Woodhouse 

INDEX 


Abbey,  Mrs  Richard,  in  charge  of 

Fanny   Keats,    147,   337, 

338 
Abbey,    Richard,     trustee    for    the 

Keats  family,  16,  83,  147, 

338,  340,  354,  365,  529 
on  Mrs  T.  Keats,  6-7 
Abbot,  The  (Scott),  476 
Achilles,  Homeric  character  of,  Keats's 

admiration  for,  147. 
Acts  and  Galatea  (Handel's  libretto). 

Song   in,    compared   with 

passage  in  Endymion,  225 
Adam's     Dreams     {Paradise     Lost), 

Keats's  debt  to,  154-5 
Aders  family,  483. 
Address  to  Hope  (Keats),  style  and 

form  of,  86 
Adlington's  translation  of  the  Golden 

Ass  of  Apuleius,  Keats's 

possible  reading  of,  412  &  n. 
Admonition,  the,  in  Hyperion,  452. 
Adonais  (Shelley),  Blackwood  parody 

on,  519. 
Enthusiasm     for     at     Cambridge 

(1829),  520,  527 
Poetic  form  of,  517. 
Preface  to,  on  the  effect  of  hostile 

reviews  on  Keats,  517 
Reprmt  of  (1829),  527 
Tribute  of  to  Keats,  483,  517-19 
Adonis,  Awakening  of,  in  Endymion, 

185 
Adventures  of  a   Younger  Son  (Tre- 

lawny).    Brown's   aid   in, 

623 
Aeneid,  Keats's  prose  version  of,  18 
After  Dark  Vapours,  sonnet  (Keats), 

91 
Ailsa  Craig,  Keats  on,  283-4 
Alastor  (Shelley),  Allegoric  theme  of, 

171-2,  234-6,  468 
Date  of  publication,  234 
Hunt's  praise  of,  69,  234 
Influence  of  on  Keats,  73,  234-6 


Alexander  fragment  (Keats)  in  prose, 

33,  551-2 
Alexander's  Feast  (Dryden),  Words- 
worth on,  251 
Alfieri,  lines  by,  applicable  to  Keats,  504 
Alfred,  The,  Reynolds's  article  in,  on 

Keats's  work,  312 
Alice  Fell  (Wordsworth),  348 
Allegory,  in 
Alastor,  171-2,  234-6,  468 
Endymion,  171-2  et  alibi 
Allegro,  L'  (Milton),  metre  of,  386 
Alps,   the,   impression   made   by  on 

Shelley,  237 
Alsager,  T.  M.,  lender  of  Chapman's 

Homer  to  Clarke,  39 
Ambleside,  Keats  at,  274,  277 
America,  tribute  from,  to  the  value  of 

Keats's  poems,  545 
American  edition  of  Keats's  poems, 

date  of  the  first,  528  n.  2 
Aminta   (Tasso),   Hunt's  translation 

dedicated  to  Keats,  472 
Anatomy    of    Melancholy    (Burton), 

Keats's  inspirations  from, 

354,  358,  371, 396-7, 404-5, 

412,  549  n.  ^ 
Ancient  Mariner  (Coleridge),  121,  396 
Angela,    in    the    Eve    of   St    Agnes, 

402-4  &  n. 
Annals  of  the  Fine  Arts,   Ode  to  a 

Nightingale  published  in, 

354 
Annus  Mirabilis  (Dryden),  echoed  by 

Keats,  392  &  n. 
Antiquary  (Scott),  Keats's  attitude  to, 

279 
Apollo  in  Delos,  428 

Hymn  to,  see  Hymn 
Apollo's  speech  in  Hyperion,  435,  437 
Apuleius,  The  Golden  Ass  of,  Keats's 

possible  reading  of,  412  &  n. 
Arabian  Nights,  influence  of,  seen  in 

Endymion,  175,  184,  190, 

191. 195 


559 


560 


INDEX 


Archiv  fiir  das  Stvdium  der  neueren 

Sprachen  (Wolters)  cited, 

416  n. 
Arethusa  myth,  in  Ovid,  and  Keats's 

and  Shelley's  poems,  187 
Arethusa  (Shelley),  187-8,  241 
Ariosto,  Keats's  studies  in,  370,  398 
Arne's  opera  Artaxerxes,  a  song  in, 

quoted  by  Keats,  490  &  n. 
Arnold,  Matthew,  on  the  works  of 

Keats  and  of  Shelley,  640, 

541,  543  &  n. 
Arnold,  W.  T.,  researches  of,  on  Keats' 

Style,  &c.,  and  edition  of 

his  poems  issued  by,  544, 

545 
Artaxerxes,  opera  (Ame),  Keats's  quo- 
tation from,  490  &  n. 
Arts,   the,   excellence  of,   Keats  on, 

253 
Asclepiad,    The,   cited   on   Keats   as 

medical  student,  30  &  n. 
As  from  the  darkening  gloom  a  silver 

dove,  sonnet  (Keats,  1816), 

91 
As  late  I  rambled  in  the  hapjpy  fields, 

sonnet  (Keats),  90 
Astronomy     (Bonny  castle),     Keats's 

prize-book  (1811),  16  n. 
Athenaeum,  Dilke's  editorship  of,  530, 

533;  Maurice's  editorship, 

526 
Reynolds's  Contributions  to,  533 
Sterling's  praise  of  Keats  in  (1828), 

326-7 
A  Thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  Ever 

(Keats),    composition    of, 

176  &n. 
Audores  Mythographi  Latini,  ed.  Van 

Staveren;  owned  and  used 

by  Keats,  447  &  n. 
Audubon,  and  George  Keats,  365 
*  Augustan'  poets,  Keats's  dislike  of, 

18 
Aurora  Leigh,  Mrs  Browning's  tribute 

in,  to  Keats,  539-40 
Autobiographical  Fragment,  An  (Proc- 
ter), 47  n. 
Autobiography  (Hunt),  401 
Autumnal  Scenes  in  Keats's  poems, 

159,  161-2 
Awnmarsh,  Allan,  translation  of  the 

Decameron  published   by, 

397  A  n. 

Bacchic  lyric  in  Endymion:   inspira- 
tion of,  230  et  sqq.,  possible 
influence    on,    of    Words- 
worth, 251. 
Keats's  term  for,  388 


Bacchus,  in  Alexander's  Feast,  Words- 
worth on,  251 
Triimaph    of,     figured    on    sarco- 
phaguses,  231  &  n. 
'Bacchus     and     Ariadne,'     Titian's 
picture  of,  as  inspiration 
for  Keats,  231 
Bailey,  Archdeacon  Benjamin,  friend 
of  Keats,  133-4,  151,  262, 
295 
Criticism    of    Endymion   by,    189, 

211,  270 
Impression   made   on,    by   Poems, 

134 
Keats's  visit  to,  at  Oxford,  142,  in 

his  own  words,  143  et  sqq. 
Letters  to,  from  Keats,   150-2,  et 
sqq.,  245,  255,  257,  262. 
270-1,  288-9 
and   Lockhart   and   the   Reviews, 

306-7,  309,  474 
Memoranda  of,  on  Keats,  534-5 
Milton  enthusiasm  of,  25/ 
Suitor  to  Mariane  Reynolds,  134; 

the  withdrawal,  341 
Support  of,  to  Keats  in  the  battle 
of  the  critics,  306-7,  309, 
311-12,  474 
on  Keats's  Theory  of  Vowel  Sounds, 

147,  402 
on  Keats  when  Reading  Aloud,  144, 
190  w. 
Baldwin's  Pantheon,  Keats's  debt  to, 

228,  231 
Bards  of  Passion,  Ode  (Keats),  form, 
metre,   hints  of  belief  in 
Immortality  in,  386-7 
*  Barry  Cornwall,'  see  Procter 
Beaconsfield,  Earl  of,  536 
Beadsman,  the,  in  Eve  of  St  Agnes, 

399,  400,  402-4  &  n. 
Beattie,  James,  poems  of,  19 
Beauly  Abbey,  Skulls  in.  Verses  on 
by  Brown  and  Keats,  295, 
440,  553-6 
Beaumont   and   Fletcher,    references 
by     to     the     Endymion 
myth,  168 
Beaumont,  Sir  George,  and  Haydon,  62 

and  Mrs  Siddons,  461 
Beaumont,  Sir  John,  on  the  rime-beat 
in  the  heroic  measure,  101, 
102 
Beauty,  in  Art  and  in  Poetry,  Keats's 
views  on,  253,  254,  418 
Essential,  Striving  for  communion 
with,  the  true  subject  of 
Endymion,  167  et  passim. 
Over-comment  on,  and  the  loss  of 
bloom,  Keats  on,  263 


INDEX 


661 


Bebr  Salim,  Arabian  tale  of,  195 

Beckford's  Vathek  familiar  to  Keats, 
184 

Bedford,  Duke  of,  carved  sarco- 
phaguses  owned  by,  231  n. 

Bedhampton,  Keats's  visits  to,  333, 
491 
Eve  of  St  Agnes  written  at,  333 

Belfast,  Keats's  flying  visit  to,  281 

Bells  and  Pomegranates  (Browning), 
528 

Ben  Nevis,  Keats  on  his  climb  up, 
293-4 

Ben  NeviSf  Sonnet  written  upon  the 
Top  of  (Keats),  294 

Bentham,  Jeremy,  and  Himt,  43 

Bentley,   Keats's   postman  landlord, 
141,  322 
Mrs,  kindness  of,  322 

Beppo  (Byron),  309 

Bertha  in  Eve  of  St  Mark,  437, 439,  and 
in  Cap  and  Bells,  444-6 

Bertram,  a  play  (Maturin),  Coleridge 
and,  303 

Bideford,  a  Keats  as  rector  of,  4 

Biographia  Liter  aria  (Coleridge),  criti- 
cism of,  in  BlackvxHxTs,  300 
on  the  Poetic  Revolution,  119 
on  Wordsworth's  poems,  245-6 

Bion's  Dirge  on  Adonis,  SheUey's  use 
of,  517 

Blackwood,  William,  and  the  Edin- 
burgh Magazine,  297  et 
sqq.'y  Scott's  countenance 
sought  by,  303-4;  Taylor's 
encounter  with,  over  the 
criticism  on  Keats,  475-7 

BlackuxHyd's  (Edinburgh)  Magazine 
Critical  savagery  of,  and  attitude 
to  Coleridge,  Hunt,  Keats 
and  others,  45,  76,  137. 
151-2,  299-300;  first 
article  of  the  'Cockney 
School  Series'  in,  attacking 
Hunt,  152;  attacks  in, 
on  Keats,  297;  details 
of  the  policy  of  the  maga- 
zine, its  editors,  &c..  297 
et  sqq.;  "Z"  articles  in, 
301-3,  307-8,  474,  527; 
fatal  duel  due  to,  519; 
indignation  of  Keats's 
friends,  309  et  sqq.,  516  et 
sqq.,  522;  Scott's  attitude, 
305-6,  525-6 
Hazlitt's  quarrel  with,  521,  and 
accusation  of,  as  to  the 
death  of  Keats,  522 
Impenitence,  and  further  berating 
of  Keats  by,  477-8 


Blake,  William,  drawings  of,  393 

Poems  of,  new  note  in,  107-8 
Blank    verse,    corruption    of,    17th 

century,  100 
Blundell's  School,  Tiverton,  4 
Boccaccio,    influence    of,    on    Keats, 
259-60,    333-4,    389,    397 
&  n.  I,  400  n.  2 
Boiardo,  552 

Keats's  reference  to,  356 
Bolton-le-Sands,  Keats  at,  271 
Bookman,  The,  of  New  York,  Hay- 
don's  'Christ's  entry  into 
Jerusalem'        reproduced 
and  discussed  in,  462  n. 
Books    in    Keats's    Library,    228  n., 
390  n.,  397  n.,  447  n.  i 
List  of,  compiled  by  Woodhouse, 
556-8 
Borghese,    Princess    (Pauline    Bona- 
parte), and  Severn,  503 
Borghese  Vase,  the,  416 
Borghese  2Jodiac,  picture  of,  as  inspi- 
ration to  Keats,  200 
Borrowers,  Keats's  diflBculties  due  to, 

323-4,  327-8,  516,  517 
Bowles,  William  Lisle,  editor  of  Pope, 
480;    Byron's  controversy 
with,  120 
Bowness,  view  of  Windermere  from, 

273 
Bradley,  A.  C,  lectures  by,  on  Keats's 
letters,  545 
on    the    Influence    of    Alastor    on 
Endymion,  234 
Bradley,  Henry,  551 
Brawne,     Fanny,     appearance     and 
character  of,  329,  330  A  n. 
Keats's   love-affair   with,    and   its 
effects  on  him,  329  et  sqq., 
437,  455,  488,  491-2.  494. 
497,  516,  535 
Keats's  love-letters  to,  360  et  sqq., 
365.     374,     375,     457-8, 
459-60,  464-5,  544 
Letters  of,  to  Keats  at  Rome,  effect 

of  on  him,  508,  511,  514 
Marriage  of,  535 
Milnes's  error  as  to,  535 
on  Keats's  memory,  535 
on  her  love  and  fears  for  Keats,  514 
on  the  strength  and  expression  of 
Keats's  passions,  465-6 
Brawne,  Mrs,  329,  330,  331,  514 
Keats's  stay  with,  375,  376-7,  485 
Letters  to,  from 

Keats,  in  quarantine,  497-8 
Severn,  on  Keats's  state,  in  Rome, 
505-6,  507-8 
Tragic  fate  of,  535 


562 


INDEX 


Bridal    night    lines,    in    Sleep    and 
Poetry,  tenderness  of,  124 
Bridges,  Robert,  on 
Keats's  poetry,  540 

and  its  relation  to  Wordsworth, 

126-9,  544-5 
on  Endymion 

Parallel  between  and  Moore's 

Epicurean,  186  n. 
Structure  of  the  poem,  173 
Bright  Star,  sonnet  (Keats),  a  cry  of 
the  heart,  334-5,  two  forms 
of,  493-4 
Britannia^ 8    Pastorals    (Browne),    as 
model  to  Keats,  21,  93,  98, 
109-10,  124 
Double-endings  in,  98,  109-10,  207 
Echoes  of,  in  Keats's  poems,  93, 
109-10,  349,  350,  401.  418 
Lines  in,  on 
Devon,  261 
Endymion,  167-8  &  n. 
British  Critic,  on  Endymion,  and  on 

the  Lamia  volume,  474 
British  Institution,  pictures  seen  by 

Keats  at,  78,  231,  464 
British    Museum,    art    treasiu-es    in, 
Keats's  knowledge  of,  and 
inspiration  from,   66,   78, 
231-2,  416 
Broadmayne,  Dorset,  the  Keatses  of,  4 
Brougham,  Lord,  challenge  of,  to  the 
Lowthers,  272 
Support  given  by,  to  Hunt,  43 
Brown,  Charles,  attitude  of,  to  George 
Keats,  529.  530 
and  Dilke,  relations  between,  381-2, 

530 
Fairy    tales,    satiric,    by,    381-2, 

444 
Friendship  of  with  Keats.  141,  142, 

159,  535 
Biographical  designs  of,  529,  530 
Scottish  walking  tour  with  Keats, 
268,  ^  271,    272    et    sqq.; 
Diaries  of,  cited,  273  dt  n. 
Keats*s  life  with,  320  et  sqq. 

Collaboration    in    writing,    295, 
357,  359,  364,  376,  440  et 
sqq.,  553-6 
Keats*s     (temporary)     indignation 

against,  465 
Loan  by,  to  Keats,  357,  373 
Second  tour  of  in  Scotland,  462; 
leading    to     absence     at 
Keats's      departure      for 
Italy.  487,  488,  491 
Letters  to,  from  Keats,  371  et  sqq., 

464,  491-2,  600,  504-5 
Satiric  verses  on,  by  Keats,  345 


Brown,  Charles — continued 
Keats's  poems  transcribed  by,494  n., 

496  &  n. 
Later  life  in  Italy,  and  death  in 

New  Zealand,  522-31 
on  Fanny  Brawne  and  her  love  for 
Keats,  514;    and  on  her 
grief  at  his  death,  515 
on  the  cause  of  Keats's  illness,  516, 

517.  522 
on    the    influence    of    the    Faerie 

Queene  on  Keats,  20 
on  the  Ireby  dancing-school,  277 
on  Keats's  first  sight  of  Windermere, 

273-4 
on  Keats's  state  of  mind  and  health 
(Oct.    1819),   375  et  sqq.; 
on  the  fatal  chill,  284;  on 
Keats  as  invalid,  456 
on   the   writing   of   the   Ode  to   a 
Nightingale,  353-4  «fe  n. 
Browne,  William,  of  Tavistock,  works 
of    {see    also    Britannia's 
Pastoral).  Keats's  familia- 
rity with,  21,  as  affecting 
his  style,  93,  109,  124 
Browning,  Elizabeth  Barrett,  tribute 

of  to  Keats,  539-40 
Browning,  Robert,  inspiration  derived 
by  from  gift  of  poems  of 
Keats  and  Shelley,  526 
Rossetti's  enthusiasm  for,  538 
Slow  sale  of  his  Bells  and  Pome- 
granates series,  528 
Bulletin    and    Review   of   the    Keats- 
Shelley  Memorial  (Morris), 
510  n. 
Burford  Bridge  Inn.  Keats's  stay  at, 
152-3.  158,  162,  242 
Endymion  finished  at,  158,  161-3 
Burnet's  History  of  his  Ovm   Time, 
influence    of,    on    Keats, 
14 
Bumey,  Fanny,  159  n. 
Bums,  Robert,  an  English,  see  Clare 

Keats  on,  282,  283-4 
Burton,  Robert  {see  Anatomy  of  Melan- 
choly), and  the  legend  of 
St  Agnes'  Eve,  396-7 
Burton-in-Kendal,  Keats  at,  272 
Byron,  Lord 
Allusion  to,  in  Hyperion,  453 
Attitude  of,  to 
Keats,  432,  480-1.  517,  520 
Hunt,  43,  47  n.,  49 
and  the  Elgin  marbles,  60 
Poems  of  {see  also  under  names),  49, 
518 
Early  Influences  on,  and  sources 
of  inspiration,  2,  268 


INDEX 


563 


Byron,  Lord — continued 
Poems  of — continued 

Keats's  appreciation  of,  31,  and 

sonnet  on,  91 
Monetary  gains  of,  82 
Verse  forms  used  by,  108,  390 
Reynolds's  poem  dedicated  to,  74 
Sovereignty  of,  as  poet,  526,  537 
at  Shelley's  cremation,  521 
on  the  effect  of  the  Reviews  on 
Keats,  517,  520  <b  see  315 
on  Hyperion,  432 
on  Leigh  Himt,  47  n.,  and  on  his 

Story  of  Rimini,  49 
Departure  for  Italy,  522 
Death  of,  521 
Byron's   Collected   Works,   Prose,    on 
Reynolds    in    later    life, 
533  &  n. 

CALIDORE  (Keats),  and  its  Induction, 
34,  sentiments,  form  and 
metre  of.  111,  122,  470 
Callington,  the  Keatses  of,  5 
Cambridge  Students,   enthusiasm  of 
for  Adonais,  and  for  Keats, 
520,  527,  530 
Camelford,  the  Keatses  around,  5 
Campbell,    John,    of    Islay,    on    the 

Goylen  story,  291  n. 
Campbell,  Thomas,  poet,  as  editor, 
473 
Poems  of 

Heroic  couplet  used  in,  108 
Jeffrey  on,  528 
Hunt  on,  44 
Camperdown,   sea   fight   of,    Keats's 

uncle  in,  5 
Canterbury,  effect  of  on  Keats,  140 
Canova,  Severn's  introduction  to,  501 
Cap  and  Bells,  The  ;  or.  The  Jealousies 
(Keats),      written      with 
Brown,  140,  380,  470 
Copymg  of,  376,  379 
Echoes  in,  87  &  n. 
First  printed,  537 
Idea  inspiring,  story,  metre,  tone, 

&c.,  367,  444,  447,  549 
Keats's  discontent  with,  380,  381, 

445  &  n. 
Lines  on  margin  of,  455 
Stanzas   in,    suggestive   of   Queen 
Caroline's  arrival,  463 
Carisbrooke,  Endymion  begun  at,  135, 

161,  176  n. 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  on  Hunt,  Lamb  and 

Keats,  532 
Caroline,  Queen,  at  Dover,  463 
Caroline  poetry,  an  instance  of  Keats's 
interest  in,  150 


Cary*s  Dante,  echoes  of,  by  Keats, 

400  n.  I 
CaMle  Builder,   The  (Keats),  a  frag- 
ment, 389 
Ca^e  of  Indolence,   The  (Thomson), 

28,342 
'Cave  of  Despair,'  Severn's  competi- 
tion picture,  380 
Cave  of  Quietude,  in  Endymion,  154 
Cenci,     The    (Shelley),    gift    of    by 

Shelley    to    Keats,    467, 

485 
ChaMee  MS.,  The,  301-3;    Scott  on, 

304 
Chamberlayne,    William,    misuse    of 

the    Heroic    Couplet    by, 

100-1,  209  n. 
Champion,  The,  519;  Stage  criticisms 

m,  by  Keats,  242-4 
Chapman,   George,   see  also  Homer, 

Hynm  to  Apollo,  Hynm  to 

Pan,  Iliad,  Odyssey 
Heroic  couplet  used  by,  98;    lines 

illustrating,  99 
Metre  used  by,  fault  in,  209 
Strained  rimes  of,  211 
Translation  of  Homer  by,  as  in- 
fluencing Keats,  38  et  sqq., 

124,  206,  428 
Character  in  men  of  Power,  and  its 

absence  in  men  of  Genius, 

Keats  on,  154 
Charioteer     theme,     in     Sleep     and 

Poetry,  117-18, 119,  198-9 
Charts  lyrics  (Jonson),  metre  of,  386 
Charles  IL,  Scott's  handling  of,  45 
'Charmian,'  an  East-Indian,  318-19, 

330;     Milnes's    error    on, 

535 
Chartier,  Alain,  and  La  Belle  Dame 

sans  Merci,  350,  469 
Chatterton,  and  the  Rowley  forgeries, 

106-7;     English    of,    and 

verse-flow,    369;     Keats's 

admiration  for,  146-7,  and 

sonnet  on,  23,  91 
Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  poems  of,  186 
Echoes    of,    in    Eve   of  St   Mark, 

437-8,  539 
Heroic  couplet  as  used  in,  lines 

illustrating,  93-4 
Influence  on  Keats,  391 
Keats's  studies  in,  341,  <fe  see  75  &  n. 
I^ndor  on,  537 
Morris's  exemplar,  539 
Verse  of,  as  'translated'  by  Dryden, 

103-4 
Cheapside,    No.   76,   lodging  of   the 

Keats  brothers,  28,  134 
Chichester,  Keats  at,  333 


564 


INDEX 


Chief  of  organic  numbers  (Keats), 
origin  of,  257 

Childe  Harold  (Byron),  21 

Christabel  (Coleridge),  121;  criticism 
of,  in  the  Edinburgh  Re- 
view, 299,  300;  tags  from, 
used  by  Keats,  243 

Christie,  J.  H.,  310,  311;  duel  of,  with 
Scott,  over  the  *Z'  papers, 
519,  526 

*  Christopher  North,'  see  Wilson 

*  Christ's     Entry     into     Jerusalem,' 

Haydon's  picture,  60,  248, 
250;  Keats  on,  256; 
private  view  of,  Keats  at, 
various  comments;  Keats' s 
head  painted  in,  460-2 

Christ's  Hospital,  Reynolds's  father's 
post  at,  74 

Church  Street,  Edmonton,  Keats's 
home  at,  9 

Circe,  in  Endymion,  191  et  sqq. 

Clare,  John,  475  &  n. 

Clarendon  Press  edition  of  Keats's 
poems  1906,  frontispiece  of, 
416  n. 

Claret,  and  Game,  Keats  on  his  liking 
for,  340 

Clark,  Sir  James,  Keats's  doctor  in 
Rome,  501,  502,  503,  504, 
514;  kindness  of,  with  his 
wife,  to  Keats,  506 

Clarke,   Charles   Cowden,   252,   539; 
Keats's  sonnet    on  when 
asleep  over  Chaucer,  75  &  n. 
Ejristle  to  (Keats),  37-8,  113 
and  Hunt,  in  prison,  43-4 
Relations  with  Keats,  8,  12,  18,  19, 
20  et  sqq.,  34-5,   36.   64; 
introduction  by,  to  Hunt, 
36,  and  to  Homer's  poems, 
38  et  sqq. 
Keats's  letter  to,  in  Dean  St.  days, 

34 
Recollections,  on  Keats  at  a  bear- 
baiting,  81-2;  on  Keats's 
fight  with  a  butcher  boy, 
343;  on  Keats  at  school, 
13, 531-2,  and  his  successes, 
14;  on  Keats's  introduc- 
tion to  Leigh  Hunt,  34-5; 
on  Keats's  power  of  Self- 
expression,  81;  on  Keats's 
reading  Poetry,  225-6; 
on  Keats  as  surgeon's 
apprentice,  17  et  sqq.,  and 
medical  student,  28;  on 
Keats's  verse-writing  to 
a  given  subject,  55;  on 
last  sight  of  Keats,  342; 


Clarke,  Charles  Cowden — continued 
Recollections — continued 

on     the     publication     of 

Poems,  130,  131 
on  T.  Keats  senior,  6 
Clarke,  John,  Keats's  schoolmaster, 

7,  8,  17,  343 
Clarke,    Mrs.    Charles    Cowden,    on 

Keats     at     her     father's 

house,  328 
Claude,  pictures  by,  inspiring  Keats, 

264,  291  n.,  417 
Clive  Newcome  and  his  friends  on 

the  Victorian  poets,  536-7 
Closed  or  Stopped  Couplet  system, 

the,  95  et  sqq. 
Avoidance    of,     by    Keats,    207, 

209  n. 
Croker's  attitude  to,  311 
Clowes,  Messrs.,  and  Webb,  76-7 
Cockerell,  Sydney,  on  Morris  and  the 

changes  in  La  Belle  Dams 

sans  Merci,  470 
'Cockney    School,'    articles    on,    in 

Blackwood's,  45,  76,  137, 

152,  299-300  et  sqq.,  477-8; 

effect  of,  313,  370.  516  et 

Shelley  included  in,  by  Maginn,  519 
Cockneyism,  verses  by  Keats  charged 

with,  109  n. 
Colbum's  New  Monthly  Magazine,  see 

New  Monthly 
Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  Anatomical 
studies  of,  29 
Critical  style  of,  46 
Friend  of  Haydon,  62 
Lack    of    negative    capability    in, 

Keats  on,  254 
Lectures  by,  on  Shakespeare,  244 
Poems  of,  21,  121 

Disuse   by,    of   the   older   verse 

form,  108,  118,  119,  207 
Echo  of,  in  Endymion,  230 
Galignani's  edition  of,  150  n.,  527 
Hazlitt's  criticism  on,  299,  300 
Hunt's  verdict  on,  44 
Rossetti's  enthusiasm  for,  538 
Political  change  of  view  of,  45 
Relations    with    Wordsworth,    45, 
108,  207;  strained,  245-6 
on  the  Poetic  revolution,  119;    on 
the  Reviews  and  Keats's 
death,  347;    on  his  walk 
with    Keats     ('There     is 
Death    in    that    hand'), 
346-8;    on   Wordsworth's 
poems.  245-6 
College    St.,    Westminster,    Keats'i 
stay  in,  374-6 


INDEX 


565 


Collins,  William,  poems  of,  19 

*Come  hither y  all  sweet  maidens,'  see 
On  a  Picture  of  Leander 

Commonwealth  and  Restoration 
Poets,  use  of  the  heroic 
couplet  by,  with  illus- 
trations, 102  et  sqq. 

Complete  Works  of  John  Keats,  edited 
by  H.  Buxton  Forman, 
referred  to,  262,  335  n.  i, 
392  n.,  400  n.  i,  459  n., 
549  n. 

Compound  Epithets,  Keats's  felicity 
in,  412-13 

Comus  (Milton),  19,  432;  Echoes  of, 
in  Endymion,  195;  Keats's 
recitations  from,  495 

Concordance  to  Keats's  Poems,  pub- 
lished by  Cornell  Uni- 
versity, 545 

Constable,  Archibald,  owner  of  the 
Edinburgh     Review,     297, 
311-12 
Relations  with  Scott,  303,  524-5 

Cooke,  Thomas,  translator  of  Hesiod, 
428 

Coolness  and  Refreshment  in  Nature, 
preferred  in  Keats's  ima- 
gery, 217-18 

Cooper,  George,  30 

Cooper,  Sir  Astley,  and  Keats,  30,  31 

Copthall  Court,  possible  treasures  in, 
534 

Cornell,  see  Concordance 

ComhiU  Magazine  for  April,  1917, 
cited  on  Coleridge's  talk 
with  Keats,  347-8  &  n. 

Cornish  origin  of  Keats's  father,  Fanny 
Keats  on,  3 

Corsair,  The  (Byron),  form  used  in, 
108 

Cotterell,  Charles,  kindness  of,  to 
Keats,  496,  498,  501 

Cotterell,  Miss,  488,  489,  490,  495. 
496,  498 

Country  Ballads,  Wordsworth's, 
Strained  simplicity  of,  121, 
348 

Couplet,  Closed,  versus  Free  System, 
95  et  sqq. 

Courthope,  W.  J.,  judgment  of,  on 
Keats,  542-3 

Cowley,  Abraham,  use  of  the  heroic 
couplet  by,  103 

Crabbe,  George,  use  of  the  heroic 
couplet  by,  108 

Craven  St.,  City  Road,  Keats's  home 
at,  3 

Crewe,  Earl  of,  owner  of  MS.  of  the 
Ode  to  a  Nightingale,  354  n. 


Cripps,  — ,  Haydon,  and  Keats,  151 
Criticism,  early  19th  century 
Amenities  of,  137-8 
Destructive,  Jeffrey  on,  480 
Personalities  in,  Scott  on,  305-6 
Croker,  John  Wilson,  criticisms  by, 
on 
Endymion,  310-11 

Tennyson's    and    Keats's    Poems, 
528  n.  I 
*  Crown,  A,  of  Ivy,'  sonnet   (Hunt), 

occasion  of,  56 
Cupid  and  Psyche  myth,  sources  of, 

open  to  Keats,  412 
Curse,    The,    of   Kehama    (Southey), 

121 
Curse,  The,  of  Minerva  (Byron),  60 
Cybele,  passage  on,  in  Sandys's  Ovid's 
Metamorphoses,   compared 
with    that    in    Endymion, 
223-4 
Cynthia  and  Endymion  story,  Keats's 
love  for,  164,  166 

Dancing,  country  school  of,  at  Ireby, 

described  by  Brown,  and 

by  Keats,  277-8 
Dante,  244 
Poems  of 
Eagle  in,  186 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  400  n.  i, 

544,545 
Keats's  travelling  book,  272,  545 
Rossetti's  love  for,  538 
Sonnet-beginnings  used  by,  92 
Davideis,    The    (Cowley),    metre    of, 

103 
Dean  St.,  No.  8,  Borough,  Keats's  first 

independent  abode,  28 
'Death      of      Alcibiades,'      Severn's 

picture    for    competition, 

503 
Death  and  Dying,  Keats's  allusions 

to,  in  his  poems,  112,  203, 

336,344 
Deathbed  feelings  of  a  Poet,  Keats 

on,  in  the  Epistle  to  George 

Keats,  112 
Decay  of  Pagan  Beauty,  Keats's  sonnet 

on,  see  To  Leigh  Hunt 
Decameron,  influence  of,  on  Keats,  see 

Boccaccio 
Decasyllabic     Couplet,     see     Heroic 

Couplet 
Defence  of  Poesy  (Shelley),  Miltonian 

passage  in,  430  <t  n. 
Delight,  the  spirit  animating  Keats's 

poetry,  83-4 
'Delia  Cruscan'  school,  519 
'Dentatus,'  picture  by  Haydon,  60 


566 


INDEX 


De  Quincey,  Thomas,  as  critic,  46,  430 
on  Keats,  and  his  poetry,  213,  528 
and  Shelley's  poetry,  477 
Descent,   The,  of  Liberty,  A  Masque 

(Hunt),  44 
de  Selincourt,  Professor  E.,  Editorial 
work  of,  on  Keats's  poems, 
545 
on  Endymion 

'Four  Elements'  theory,  173 
*Moon'  passage  in,  215 
on  Eve  of  St  Agnes 

*  Corbels '  passage  in,  400  n.  i 
on  Hyperion,  the  scale  of,  427 
Destnictiveness    of   Nature,    Keats's 

lines  on,  265 
de  Vere,  Aubrey,  540 
Devonshire,  Keats's  Visit  to,  260  et 
sqq.;  second  visit  planned, 
357 
the  Keats  of,  4,  5 
De  Wint,  P.,  380 

Dilke,  Charles  Wentworth,  friendship 
of,  with  Keats  and  Brown, 
141-2,    308,    321,    332-3, 
346,  370,  458,  465,  491, 
530 
George  Keats  exonerated  by,  530 
House  of,  321 
Letters  to,  from  Keats,  371 

on  supporting  himself  by  his  pen, 

373 
on  Tom  Keats's  illness,  316 
Literary  tastes  and  work  of,  141-2, 
167 
Editorship    of    the    Athenaeum, 
530,  533 
Relations  of,  with  the  Brawnes,  535 
on  James  Rice,  76 
Views  of,  on  Keats's  attachment^to 
Fanny  Brawne,  330  n.,  331 
Dilke,  Mrs  C.  W.,  321;  on  the  Fairy 
tales     competition,     381; 
on  Keats,   on  his  return 
from  Scotland,  296 
Dilke,  Sir  Charles,  Keats   collection 
given  by,   to  Hampstead 
Public      Library,      16  w., 
33  n.  2 
Owner    of    Keats's    Sosibio    Vase 
tracing,  416  n. 
Dilke,  William,  321  n. 
Divine  Comedy  (Dante),  influence  of, 

on  Keats,  545 
Dodsley,    James,    'Old    Plays'    by, 
Dilke's    continuation    of, 
142 
Don  Esteban  (Llanos),  536 
Don  Giovanni,  pantomime  on,  Keats's 
criticism  on,  242 


Don  Juan  (Byron),  444  ^ 

Keats  on,  366,  496 
Metre  of,  445 

Reference   in,    to   Keats,    481,    as 

killed  by  the  Reviews,  520 

Donne,  Dr.  John,  Methods  of,  with  the 

Heroic  Couplet,  100 
Downer,  A.  C,  The  Odes  of  Keats  by. 
Urn  illustrated  in,  416  n. 
Dragon-world  and  its  hundred  eyes, 

Keats  on,  336 
Dramatic  Specimens  (Lamb),  142 
Fuller's  words  on  Fancy,  quoted  in, 
388-9 
'Draught,    A,    of   Sunshine*    ('Hence 
Burgundy,*    &c.)    (Keats), 
lines  in,  on  the  Madness  of 
Song,  257 
Drayton,    Michael,    influence   of,  on 
Keats,  seen  in 
Endymion,  206,  216 
Epistle  to  Reynolds,  21 
Hyperion,  175 
Sprightly  lines  by,  109  n. 
Two   poetic   versions    by,    of   the 
Endymion  theme,   echoes 
of,  in  Keats's  poem,  168 
et  sqq. 
Use  by,  of  Heroic  Couplet,  97-8 
Dream,     A,     after    reading     Dante's 
Episode     of     Paolo     and 
Francesca,  Sonnet  (Keats), 
343 
Drununond  of  Hawthornden,  William, 
references  of,  to  Endymion 
in  his  sonnets,  168 
Dryden,  John 

Influence  of,  on  Keats,  seen  in 
Drear-Nighted  December,  160 
Isabella,  392 
Use  by,  of  Heroic  Couplet,  103 
'Duchess    of    Dunghill,'    Keats    on, 

283 
Duncan,  Admiral,  5 
Durdle  Door,  492 

Duverger's  French  Grammar  owned 
by  Keats,  16  n. 

Eagle,  the,  in  Endymion  and  other 

poems,  186 
Earthly  Paradise,  The  (Morris),  539 
Eclectic  Review,  The,  Reviews  by,  of 

Keats's  poems 
Lamia,  474 
Poems,  132 
Eden,  The,  of  Imagination  (Reynolds), 

74 
Edgeworth,  Maria,  and  Hunt,  43 
Edinburgh  Magazine  on  the  Lamia 

volume,  474-5 


INDEX 


567 


Edinburgh    Monthly    Magazine,    see 

Blackwood's 
Edinburgh  Review,  politics,  publisher 
and  rival  of,  297 
Critical  ferocity  in,  299 
Hazlitt  in,  on  Keats  as  killed  by  the 

Reviews,  521-2 
Influence  of,  316 

Jeffrey's  article  in,  on  Endymion, 
and  on  the  Lamia  volume, 
479-80 
Reynolds's  contributions  to,  533 
Edmonton,  third  home  at,  of  Keats, 

9,  39,  113       ' 
Eglantine  Villa,  Shanklin,  358  n. 
Election  of  a  Poet  Laureate  (Duke  of 

Buckingham),  44 
Election  contest,  Keats's  contact  with, 

277,274 
Elgm,    Earl    of,    231  w.;     and    the 
Parthenon  Marbles,  59-60 
Elgin  Marbles,  the,  Haydon's  defence 
of  the  removal  of,  69-60, 
460 
Hunt's  sonnet  on,  63 
Keats's  reveries  among,  416 
Keats's  sonnets  on,  66-7 
Eliot,  George,  phrase  of,  on  the  word 

Love,  549  n. 
Elizabethan  Poets  and  Poetry,  Keats's 
introduction  to,  19 
Influence  of,  on  Keats's  poems,  124, 
168  et  sqq.,  171,  206,  207, 
209,  223  et  sqq.,  389,  442, 
479 
Keats's  studies  of,  430 
Spirit  of,  reborn  in  Keats,  171 
Use  in,  of  the  Couplet,  Closed  and 
Free  Systems,  95,  illustra- 
tions, 96  et  sqq.,  207 
Elizabethan  versions  of  the  Endymion 

story,  167  et  sqq. 
Ellis,  George,  and  the  Legend  of  St. 

Agnes'  Eve,  398  n. 
Elmes,    James,    and    the    Ode   to    a 

Nightingale,  354 
** Enchanted  Castle,"  by  Claude,  in- 
spiration of,  to  Keats,  264, 
291  &  n.;  owner  of  265  n. 
Endimion  (Gombauld),  parallels  to,  in 

Keats's  poem,  175  &  n. 
Endimion   (Lyly),    edited  by  Dilke, 

167;   allegory  in,  168  n. 
Endimion  and  Phoebe  (Drayton),  169; 

echoed  by  Keats,  216 
Endings  of  Lines 

Closed,  Keats's  avoidance  of,  207 
Double,  Keats's  relinquishment  of, 
207 
End  Moor,  the  toper  at,  273,  277 


End  rime-syllables 

Chaucerian,  94-5 

Elizabethan,  95  et  sqq. 
Endymion,     the     Greek     myth    of, 
166  &  n. 
Browne's  reference  to,  167-8  <fe  n. 
in  Elizabethan  poetry,  167  et  sqq. 
in  Sleep  and  Poetry,  123 
Endymion  (Keats),  257  n.,  386,  389, 
467,  470 

Affinities  of  lines  in,  with  those  in 
other  poems,  176  n.,  207 
et  sqq.,  236 

Allegorical  strain  in,  171  et  sqq. 

Analysis  of,  164  et  sqq. 

Reason  for  undertaking,  204-5 

Ascending  scale  in,  181-2 

Autumnal  scene  in,  161 

Bailey's  praise,  and  Keats's  apathy, 
270 

Beauties  in,  mixed  with  the  faults, 
214  et  sqq. 

Begun  at  Carisbrooke,  135,  161, 
176  &  n. ;  opening  lines  of, 
161,  partly  written  at 
Oxford,  142-3,  147;  pro- 
gress of,  140,  141,  Keats's 
depression  during,  150, 
and  letters  on  to  friend 
whilst  writing,  150,  151, 
153,  study  of,  helpful  to 
understanding  the  poem, 
154 

Brought  to  a  close  at  Burford 
Bridge,  158-9,  161;  last 
lines  of,  161-2;  copying 
of,  by  Keats,  244,  251; 
revision  and  correction  of, 
for  press,  244;  Keats's 
letters  on  to  Taylor,  260; 
seen  through  the  press, 
262. 

Book  I.,  175 

Book  II.,  182 

Book  III.,  189 

Book  IV.,  197 

Characters  in,  166,  177  et  alibi 

Contemporary  influences  seen  in, 
233  et  sqq. 

Date  of  publication,  163 

Deeper  speculative  and  symbolic 
meanings  of,  and  of  Keats's 
other  poems,  key  to,  153-4 

Dramatic  promise  of,  222 

Elizabethan  influence  seen  in,  124, 
168  et  sqq.,  206-7,  223  et 
sqq. 

English  spirit  in,  391 

Exordium  of,  famous  line  in, 
176  «fe  n. 


568 


INDEX 


Endymion  (Keats) — continued 
Faults  and  flaws  in,   207  et  sqq., 

392,  407,  411 
Spiritual,  213  et  sqq.,  392 
Technical,  211  et  sqq. 
Inseparable    from    its    Beauties, 

214 
First  title  of,  73 
Germs  of,  67-8,  259  n. 
Hunt's  views  on,  150-1,  252-3.  312 
Ideas  in,  448 

in  Embryo,  259  n. 
Ironic  power,  promise  of,  in,  222 
as  Keats's  test  of  his  own  poet-hood, 

165;    his   own   judgment 

on  the  poem,  269 
Long  meditated,  135 
Love  as  treated  in,  181,  183,  213, 

222,  549 
Lyrics    in,    compared    with    their 

sources,  224  et  sqq. 
Models  for,  Jeffrey  on,  479 
Moods    and    aims    governing    the 

writing  of,  254 
New  sympathies  awakened,  188 
Pioneer  work,  Keats  on,  254 
Poetic  melody  of,  147 
Poetry  of,  qualities,  affinities  and 

defects  of,  207  et  sqq. 
Preface  to,  269,  modesty  of,  308 
Reference  in,  to  the  Pymmes  brook, 

10 
Reviews  on,  307  et  sqq.,  463,  474, 

477-8,  479-80,  528  *  n.  i, 

529,  543  n. 
Keats  on,  314-15 
Source  of  the  Indian  Maiden  in 

Book  IV.,  33 
Sources  of  Inspiration,  165  et  sqq. 
Study  on,  by  Mrs  F.  M.  Owen, 

544 
Subject:    Analysis  of,   164,  Keats 

on,  148 
Symbolism  of,  172  et  sqq.,  312,  411; 

the  Four  Elements  theory, 

173-4,  error  of,  175 
Taylor's  purchase  of  copyright  of, 

486 
True  meaning  of,  544 
Endymion  sarcophagus,  from  Italy, 

at  Woburn,  231  n. 
Enfield,  Clarke's  school  at,  7  ef  sqq.; 

Keats's  attachment  to,  17 

et  sqq.,  and  lines  on,  37, 

113 
Enfield  Chase,  beauties  of,  22 
Englefield,  Sir  Henry,  and  the  Story 

of  Rimini,  49 
English  character  of  Keats's  poems, 

Jeffrey  on,  480 


English  Heroic  Metre,  Leigh  Hunt's 

effort  to  revive,  47-9 
English  Historical  Portraits,  Show  of, 

Keats  at,  464 
English  Literature,  Hunt's  predilec- 
tions in,  47 
English  Poetry,  History  of,  lines  on, 

in  Sleep  and  Poetry,  118-19 
English  Poets,  Keats's  attendance  at 

Hazlitt's  lectures  on,  244, 

300 
English  Romance  poetry,  Rossetti's 

love  for,  538 
English  Spring  flowers,  Keats's  delight 

m,  497 
English  Writers,  Why  so  fine  ?  Keats 

on,  355-6 
Enid   (Tennyson),   a   Keats   remini- 
scence in,  123 
Epic  poetry,  the  obvious  model  for, 

429 
Epicurean,   The  (Moore),  model  for, 

186  n. 
Epipsychidion  (Shelley),  possibleechoes 

in,  of  Endymion,  240,  241 
Epistle    to    Charles    Cowden     Clarke 

(Keats),  37-8.  113 
Epistle    to     George     Felton     Maihew 

(Keats),  93,  109  &  n.,  110, 

470 
Epistle  to  Henry  Reynolds  (Drayton), 

sprightly  lines  from,  109 
Epistle  to  Maria  Gisborne  (Shelley), 

versification  in,  241 
Epistle  to  my  brother  George  (Keats), 

37,  111-13 
Epistles   (Keats)    group   of    {see   the 

foregoing),  in  Poems,  metre 

and  form  of,  93 
Epithalamion  (Spenser),  lines  in,  on 

Endymion,      167;      lyric 

effect  in,  122 
Epping  Forest,  22;    reminiscences  of 

in  Keats's  poems,  90 
Essays  in  Criticism,  Arnold's  Essay 

on    Keats    reprinted    in, 

543  n. 
Essays  and  Studies  (Suddard),  157  n. 
Essays  and    Tales   (Sterling),   praise 

in,    of   Keats,  527  di  n.  i, 

528  n.  3 
Ethereal  Musings,  Keats  on,  155 
Eton,  famous  headmaster  of,  4  n. 

Woodhouse  at,  134 
Eve  of  St  Agnes,  legend  of,  Jonson 

on,  396 
Eve,  The,  of  St  Agnes  (Keats),  308. 

350,  406,  443;  an  achieve- 
ment, 386,  396;    written 

at    Bedhampton.     333-4; 


INDEX 


569 


Eve,  The,  of  St  Agnes  (Keats) — contd. 

read   to   Cowden   Clarke, 

342,  343 
Feast  of  Fruits  in,  Miltonie  parallel 

to,  401 
Hunt's  picture  from,  538 
Lines  in,  reminiscent  of  Wieland's 

Oberon,  87  n. 
Poetic  scope  and  method  of,  399  et 

sqq. 
Place  of,  in  English  poetry,  386, 

396 
Publication  plans,  366 
Shelley's  delight  in,  483 
Some  changes  made  in,  367 
Sources,  story,  form,  beauties,  and 

metre  of,  396  et  sqq.,  436 
Eve,   The,  of  St  Mark  (Keats),  140, 

444,  445,  470 
Bridge     between      Chaucer     and 

Morris,  539 
Date  of,  334,  337,  437 
Included  in  Milnes's  Book,  537 
Incomplete,  339 
Sent  to  George  Keats,  371 
Subject,   metre,   form;    echoes  in, 

relation  of,  to  the  P.R.B., 

and  Keats's  own  words  on, 

437-41 
Evocation,  and  Exposition,  the  genius 

of  Keats  and  of  Words- 
worth seen  in,  128-9,  234. 

267-8 
Ewing,  Mr,  kindness  of,   to  Keats, 

506 
Examiner,    The,    founded    by    John 

Hunt,  42,  46 
Edited  from  prison  by  Leigh  Hunt, 

44 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  14 
Keats's  critique  in,  on  Reynolds's 

skit  on  Peter  Bell,  348 
Poems  published  in,  by 
Keats,  35  &  n.,  36,  38,  54,  66-7, 

73 
Reynolds.  73-4 
Shelley.  73 
Reynolds'     Endymion    article    re- 
issued in,  312 
Shelley's  Alastor  praised  in,  234 
on  the  New  Movement  in  Poetry 

as     shown     in     'Poems,' 

131-2 
Excursion,  The  (Wordsworth),  21,  128 
Effect  of,  on  Shelley,  and  on  Keats, 

233-4 
Passage  in,  on  Greek  Mythology, 

Keats  on,  125,  146,  250 
Exordium  to  Book  III.  of  Endymion, 

189 


Fabliaux  ou  Contes,  by  Le  Grand; 

Way's   translation   of,   33 

&  n.  I 
*  Faded   the  flower,'    lines   on   Fanny 

Brawne,    date    and    self- 
expression  in,  377-8 
Faerie  Queene  (Spenser,  q.v.),  influence 

of,   on  Keats,    19-21,   31, 

177,  185,  428 
Fairfax,  Edward,  Italian  stanza  form 

used  by,  390 
Fairies  of  the  Four  Elements  (Keats), 

words  for  operatic  chorus, 

350,  441 
Faithful  Shepherdess   (Fletcher),   the 

Endymion  passage  in,  168 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  168,  206, 

386,  479 
Metre  of,  386 
Falmouth  district,  the  name  Jennings 

common  in,  5 
'Fame  like  a  Wayward  Girl,'  sonnet 

(Keats),  echoes  in,  349-50 
Fancy  (Keats),  263,  date,  386-7 

Metre,  form,  subject  and  Inspiration 

of,  327,  387-9 
Published   in   the   Lamia  volume, 

470 
Fancy,    The,    a    medley    (Reynolds), 

475  n. 
Faust   (Goethe),   opening  chorus   of, 

217 
Feast  of  Fruits,  in 

Eve  of  St  Agnes,  Miltonie  parallel 

to,  401 
Hyperion,  450-1,  542 
Feast  of  the  Poets  (Himt),  earlier  skits 

on  which  modelled,  44 
Keats's  allusion  to,  113 
Treatment  in,  of  Scott,  45,  303 
'Feel,'  as  used  in  '7n  drear-nighted 

December,'  159  n. 
Fetter  Lane,  Coleridge's  lectures  on 

Shakespeare  in,  244 
Filocolo,    II    (Boccaccio),    compared 

with  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes, 

397-8  &n.2 
Finch,  Colonel,  517 
Fingal's  Cave,  Keats  on,  in  prose  and 

verse,  292 
Finsbury,    earliest    home    of    Keats 

in,  3 
FitzGerald,  Edward,  admiration  of,  for 

Keats,  527 
on  the  poetry  of  Keats  and  Shelley, 

541 
Fitzwilliam,  Earl,  help  from,  to  Keats, 

486 
Fladgate  firm  of  solicitors,  Reynolds 

with,  533 


570 


INDEX 


Fletcher,  John,  Endymion  passage  by, 
168 
Influence  seen  in  Keats's  Poems,  386 
in  Endymion,  206 
in  Sleep  and  Poetry,  125 
Metre  used  by,  386 
Faults  in,  209 
Floire  et  Blanchejlor,  metrical  romance 
on.  in  relation  to  Isabella, 
397-8 
Florence,    Artists    and    Literati    at, 
522-3,  630 
Milnes's  meeting  at,  with  Brown, 
530 
Floure,    The,   and  the  Lefe   (Pseudo- 
Chaucer), 
Echoes  of,  in  Keats's  poems,  115, 

177 
Keats's  sonnet  on,  75  &  n. 
Flowers,  English  Spring,  Keats's  lines 

on,  446-7 
Foliage,    *Laureation*    Sonnets    pub- 
lished in,  307 
Foot  measure  of  Stanzas,  350  &  n. 
Forest  Scene  and  Festival,  in  Endy- 
mion, 177  et  sqq. 
Forman,  H.  Buxton,  Complete  Works 
of  John  Keats  edited  by, 
references  to,  544,  549  n. 
&  see  footnotes 
Help   of,    to    Sefiora   Llanos    (nee 

Keats),  536 
on  the  *  Bright  Star'  sonnet,  335  n.  i 
on  the  Corbels,  in  Eve  of  St  Agnes, 

400  n.  I 
on  an  Echo  of  Dryden  by  Keats, 

392  n. 
on  Mrs  Lindon's  letter  on  Keats, 

465  n. 
on  a  reading  in  the  Ode  to  Fanny, 

335  n. 
on  a  tendresse  felt  for  Keats,  262 
French  literature,  the  less  well-known, 

Keats's  reading  in,  175  n. 
Frere,  Hookham,  49;  use  by,  of  the 

ottava  rima,  390 
Frere,  John,  and  Coleridge's  meeting 
with  Keats  in  1819,  347-8 
Fuller,  on  Fancy.  388-9 

Gaugnani's  edition  of  the   Poems 
of  Shelley.  Coleridge,  and 
Keats  (1829),  527 
*/n  drear-nighted  December,'  printed 
in,  159  n. 

'Gallipots'    article,    in    Blackwood's, 
307-8 

Galloway,  Keats  in,  279  et  sqq. 

Garden    of   Proserpine    (Swinburne), 
metre  of,  161 


Garden  of  Florence  (Reynolds),  333 
Garnett,  Richard,  on  Shelley's  letters 

and  those  of  Keats,  541 
Gem,  The,  *In  a  Drearnighted  December* 

printed  in,  159  n. 
George,  Prince-Regent,  "baited"  in 

The  Twopenny  Post,  43 
George   III.,    poetry   of   his   period, 

207 
Gibson,    John,    the    Sculptor,    and 

Severn,  503 
Gifford,  William,  editor  of  the  Quarterly 

Review,  299 
Critical  ferocity  of,  137 
Hazlitt's  Letter  to,  341 
Shelley's  letter  of  remonstrance  to 

(unsent)    on    the    hostile 

criticism   on   Keats,    482, 

516-17 
Gil  Bias   (Le  Sage),   and  the  word 

'Sangrado,*  309  <fe  n. 
Gipsies,  The  (Wordsworth),  Keats  on, 

151 
Gisbome,  Mr.  &  Mrs.,  and  Keats, 

466-7,  516 

*  Give  me  a  golden  pen,'  sonnet  (Keats), 

in  Poems,  90 
*Give   me   women,    vnne    and    snuff,* 

couplets  (Keats),  32 
Gladstone,    Rt    Hon.    W.    E.,    and 

Severn,  526 
Glaucus,   in  Endymion,   140;    magic 

robe  of,  possible  source  of, 

170,  190  et  sqq. 
Gleig,  Bishop,  306 

Gleig,  Chaplain-general,  306,  310,  341 
Glencroe  and  Loch  Awe,  Keats  on, 

289  &  n.,  290 

*  Glory    and    Loveliness    have    pass'd 

away,'    sonnet    to    Leigh 

Hunt  (Keats),  83,  90 
*God  of  the  golden  bow,'  in  Hymn  to 

Apollo  (Keats),  58 
Godfrey    of    Bulloigne    (Tasso,    trs. 

Fairfax),  metre  of,  390 
Godwin,  Mary  (Mrs  Shelley),  70 
Godwin,    William,    influence    of,    on 

Shelley,  540 
Primer  of  Mythology  by,  228  n.,  231 
on  Keats's  poems,  41 
Goethe  Circle,  at  Weimar,  Lockhart's 

intimacy  with,  298,  309 
Golden  Ass  of  Apuleius,  as  possible 

inspiration  to  Keats,  412 

<fen. 
Golden    Treasury    Series    edition    of 

Keats's  poems,  544 
Goldsmith's  Greek  History,  Haydon's 

gift  of,  to  Keats,  65 
Gollancz,  Prof.  Israel,  651,  553 


INDEX 


671 


Goylen,  ruins  and  legend  of,  291 
Gray,   Thomas,   poems   of,    19;    in- 
fluence of,  on  Keats,  23 
Verse-forms  used  by,  108 
Great  Smith  St.,  the  Dilkes  m,  374 

*  Great    Spirits    now    on    Earth    are 

Sojourning,'  sonnet  to 
Haydon  (Keats),  65,  120; 
echoes  of,  in  Endymion, 
120;  included  in  Poems, 
91 
Greek  History  (Goldsmith),  given  by 

Haydon  to  Keats,  65 
Greek  Liberation,   Byron,   and  Tre- 
lawny,  521,  522 
Mythology,  the  Endymion  legend 
in,  166  n. 
Keats's  delight  in  2,  81,  114,  and 
poetical    use    of,    218-19, 
224    et   sqq.,    264-5,    414, 
418,  426;    Sources  of  his 
knowledge  of,  14, 126, 171; 
his     Talk     on,     78;      its 
Vitality  to  him,  110 
Revitalization    of,     in    Europe, 
219-20 
Religion,  and  its  evolution,  Words- 
worth on,  125-6,  220 
Sculpture,  see  Elgin  Marbles 

Influence  of,  on  Keats,  231  n., 
414  et  sqq. 
Style  in  poetry,  Keats  on,  426 
Green,  Joseph  Henry,  346  &  n.,  347 
Green,    Miss   E.    M.,    A    Talk   with 
Coleridge,  edited  by  Corn- 
hill  Magazine,  April  1917, 
died,  347-8  A  n. 
Guy  Mannering  (Scott),  279 
Guy's  Hospital,  Keats's  student  days 
at,  16  &  n. 

*HAD  I  a  Man's  fair  form,'  sonnet 
(Keats),  included  in  Poems, 
89 

Hadrian,  age  of,  Parthenon  sculptures 
assigned  to  by  the  dilet- 
tanti, 60 

*  Hadst  thou  lived  in  days  of  old '  (Keats) , 

Valentine  for  Miss  Wylie, 

metre  of,  34,  269,  386 
Halecret,  meaning  of,  429  <fe  n. 
Hallam,  Arthur,  and  the  poems  of 

Shelley  and  Keats,  527 
Hammond,  Thomas,  surgeon,  Keats's 

apprenticeship  to,  16  <St  n.  2, 

26  n.,  30 
Hampstead,  Himt's  home  at,  Keats's 

pleasure  at,  35-7 
Keats's  life  at,  141,  244,  245  et  sqq., 

322 


Hampstead  Public  Library,  the  Dilke 
Keats  collection  at,  16  w., 
33  n. 
Handful  of  Pleasant  Delites  (Robin- 
son) ,  Keats '  s  possible  know- 
ledge of,  158  &  n. 
Happiness,  Keats  on,  154 
Happy  is  England,   sonnet   (Keats), 
34;  included  in  Poems,  89 
Happy  Warrior,   The  (Wordsworth), 

form  of,  108 
Hare,  Julius,  Sterling's  letter  to,  on 
the  Poems  of  Tennyson 
&  Keats,  528 
Haslam,  William,  the  "oak  friend" 
of  Keats,  77,  141,  345, 
487 

in  love,  Keats's  mockery  on,  371 

Letters  to,  from  Severn,  on  Keats's 
health  in  1820,  466;  on 
the  voyage  to  Italy,  489 
et  sqq.,  and  Keats's  life 
there,  498  et  sqq.;  on 
money  troubles  in  Rome, 
508-9 

and  the  Milnes  Biography,  534 

on  his  love  for  Keats,  513-14 
Haydon,  Benjamin,  135,  347 

Appearance,  62 

as  Artist,  Controversialist,  Writer, 
59-62,  67 

Characteristics,  59,  60  et  sqq.,  532 

and  the  Elgin  marbles,  59-61,  63 

Friends  of,  and  his  quarrels  with 
them,  62,  71,  153,  254 

Friendship  with  Keats,  beginning 
and  course  of,  64  et  sqq., 
135.  136,  141,  255,  347 

Keats's  Sunday  Evenings  with, 
and  meeting  with  Words- 
worth diuing,  245  et  sqq. 

in  Great  Marlborough  St.,  150,  151 

Letters  from,  to  Keats,  on  their 
friendship,  67-8;  on  Prayer, 
62,  138-9 

Letters  to,  from  Keats,  on  dis- 
satisfaction with  Endy- 
mion, 150;  on  Haydon's 
painting,  256;  on  a  new 
Romance  in  his  mind,  334 

Letters  to  and  from  Keats,  on  a 
Loan,  323-4,  337-8,  339-40, 
354-5;  see  also  370 

and  the  Ode  to  a  Nightingale,  354 

Pictures  by,  60 

'Christ's  Entry  into  Jerusalem,' 
heads  of  his  friends  in,  60, 
250  462 
Exhibition  of,  Keats  at,  460 
Keats's  estimation  of,  256 


572 


INDEX 


Hajdon,  Benjamin — continued 
Pseudo- vegetarianism  of,  250 
and  Shelley,  a  heated  dessert-talk 

between,  71 
Sonnets  addressed  to,  by 
Keats,  65,  66,  67,  91,  120 
Reynolds,  65 
Wordsworth,  65 
Sources  of  his   acounts   of  Keats 

used   in  present   volume, 

532 
on   the    dinner   when   Keats   met 

Wordsworth,    Lamb    and 

Kingston,  &c.,  246  et  sqq.; 
on  Keats  as  a  child,  7 
on  Keats's  eyes,  79 
on  Keats,  as  killed  by  the  Reviews, 

520 
on  Keats's  lack  of  decision,  369 
on  Keats's  plunge  into  dissipation, 

379-80 
on  his  last  sight  of  Keats,  486-7 
on  reading  Shakespeare  with  Keats, 

66 
on  Sleep  and  Poetry,  130 
on  Scott's  beautifiil  smile,  525  n. 
Suicide  of,  532 
*B.aydon!  forgive   me   that  I  cannot 

speak,'  sonnet  (Keats),  on 

the  Elgin  Marbles,  67 
Hazlitt,  William,  133 

Appearance   and   conversation   of, 

69 
Attitude  to,  of  Blackwood,  300 
as  Critic,  119,  151,  263;    ferocity 

of,   137,  299,  300;    style 

of,  243,  244 
Friendship  of,  with 
Haydon,  62 
Keats,  68,  77 
Invective  of,  against  Gifford,  341 
Lectures  by,  on  English  Poets,  244, 

300;  Keats  at,  244 
Taste  of,  Keats  on,  68,  250 
Wrath  of,  on  the  BlacktDOod  Re- 
views, 311,  314 
on  Haydon's  'Christ's  Entry  into 

Jerusalem,'  461,  462  n. 
on  Keats,  as  killed  by  the  Reviews, 

521-2 
on  Keats's  verses,  41 
on  Shelley,  70 

on  Wordsworth,  aet.  48,  249 
on  Wordsworth's  conversation  on 

poetic  subjects,  251 
Heine,  Heinrich,  229 
Heliconia  (ed.  Park),  158  n. 
Hemans,  Felicia,  verse  of,  526 
'Hence  Burgundy,   Claret  and  Port,' 

see  Draught  of  Sunshine 


Henry  VI.  (Shakespeare),  as  played 

by  Kean,  Keats's  criticism 

on,  242,  243 
Hercules,    triumphs    of,    figured    on 

sarcophaguses,  231  &  n. 
Hero  and  Leander  (Marlowe),  Heroic 

Couplet  as  used  in,  169 
Metre  of,  96 
'Heroic'    Couplet,    the,    history    of, 

93  et  sqq. 
Keats's  use  of,  93,  207  et  sqq.,  406 
Hesiod's  Theogony,  the  Titans  in,  428 
Hessey,  — ,  see  also  Taylor  and  Hessey 
Indignation  of,   at  the  Blackwood 

Reviews,  311 
Letters  to,  from 

Keats,  on  the  criticisms  on  Endy- 

mion,  and  the  defence  by 

his  friends,  311 
Taylor,   on  his   joust   with   W. 

Blackwood,   over  Keats's 

poems,  475-7 
Hilton,  — ,  380;  help  from,  for  Keats, 

486 
Holman,    Louis    A.,    and    Haydon's 

'Christ's  Entry  into  Jeru- 
salem,' 462  n. 
on  the  source  of  the  P.R.B.,  325 
Holmes,  Edward,  on  Keats  as  a  boy, 

11-12 
Holy    Living    and    Dying     (Jeremy 

Taylor),  Keats  soothed  by, 

in  Rome,  509 
Holy  State  (Fuller),  on  Fancy,  388-9 
Homer,    Chapman's   Translation   of, 

Keats's    ddrght    in,    and 

sonnet  oM^^d^et  sqq.;   in- 
fluence seen  in  Endymion, 

206 
on  the  Hyperion  story,  428 
Homeric  Hymn  to  Pan  in  Chapman's 

Translation,    lines    from, 

225-6 
Hood,  Mrs.  Thomas  {nSe  Reynolds), 

55 
Hood,  Thomas,  159  n.,  255;  Parodies 

written  by,  with  Reynolds, 

533 
Hope,  lines  on,  in  Endymion,  182 
Horace,     influence     of,     on     Keats, 

428<fcn. 
Home,  Richard  Hengist,  schoolfellow 

of  Keats,  77;    on  Keats 

while  with  Mr  Hammond, 

18 
Houghton,  Lord  (see  also  Milnes),  342 
Poems    by    Keats,    posthumously 

published  by,  334-5  d  nn. 
La  Belle  Dame gWenhom  Brown's 

transcript,  469 


INDEX 


573 


Houghton  MSS.,  referred  to,  12  n., 
30  n.,  56  n.,  92  n.,  147  n., 
307  n.,  e<  oZzW 
House  of  Fame  (Chaucer),  the  Eagle 
in,  186;    mfluence  seen  m 
The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  437-8 
*How  many  bards  gild  the  lapses  of 
timey  sonnet  (Keats),  88 
Date  and  Text  of,  88 
Echoes  in,  89 
Technique  of,  88 
Human  Lijfe,  Keats's  reflections  on,  267 
Human   Nature,    Keats's    increasing 

interest  in,  276  el  sqq. 
Humour  and  Wit,  Keats  on,  245 
Humphrey    Clinker    (Smollett),    pre- 
ferred by   Keats   to    The 
Antiquary  (Scott),  279 
Hungarian    Brothers,    The    (Porter), 

325 
Hunt,  James  Henry  Leigh,  139  <fe  n., 
347 
Appearance  and  charm  of,  45-6 
Attacks    on,    in    Blackwood^ s,    45, 

151-2,  300-3,  477 
Attitude  of,  to 
Blackwood's,  45,  314 
Scott's  poems,  21,  45,  303 
Wordsworth's       'Simple       life' 
poems,  348 
Champion  of  poetic  revolution,  47, 

49,  119,  207 
Classical  translations  by,  52 
Contrasts     in     his     Diction     and 

Breeding,  46,  47  «fe  n.  i 
as  Critic,  44-5,  46,  48,  299 
Criticisms  on,  by  Keats,  263,  324, 

328-9 
Faults  of  Style,  46,  47  &  n.,  459, 

477 
Financial  ineptitude  of,  46  et  alibi 
Friendship  of,  with 

Cowden  Clarke,  35  et  sqq. 
Hay  don,  63;   quarrels  of,  254 
Keats,  and  influence  on  him,  14, 
18,  35  et  sqq.,  41,  51  et  sqq., 
109,   111,    125,   141,   214, 
509,532 
Haydon's      caution      on,      and 

Keats's  reply,  138-40 
Intercoronation      episode,      and 
his  verses  thereon,  54-6, 307 
Keats's     changed     attitude     to, 

252-3 
Kindness  to  Keats  in  his  illness 
(1820),  462,  464,  466;  and 
renewed  friendliness,  472 
Shelley,  69  et  sqq.,  and  influence 
on  him,  241;  present  at 
his  cremation,  521 


Hunt,  James  Henry  Leigh — continued 

Imprisonment  of,  23,  42,  43 

Keats's  sonnet  on  his  release,  23 

Keats's  first  published  work  dedi- 
cated to,  83.  90,  130-1 

in  Later  life,  532 

Letter  from,  to  Severn  at  Rome, 
on  the  love  of  Keats's 
friends  for  him,  515-16 

Letter  to,  from  Keats,  of  criticism, 
137 

Life  at  Hampstead,  35  et  sqq.,  50  et 
sqq. 

Lines  from  Cap  and  Bells  pubHshed 
by,  445 

Literary  industry  of,  and  writings, 
34,  46 

Memories  of  Keats  in  his  writings, 
532 

at  Novello's,  327,  328 

Papers  edited  by,  see  Examiner, 
Indicator,  Reflector 

as  Poet,  518 

Poems  by  (see  under  their  Titles), 
44,  63,  130-1.  138 
Anapaestic  verses  by,  to  friends, 
50,51 

Praise  by,  of  Alastor,  in  The  Exor 
miner,  234 

Religious  views  of,  51 

Review  by,  of 

Lamia  volume,  410-11,  472-3 
Poems,  131-2 

Sketch  of  his  origin,  life  and  career, 
41  et  sqq. 

and  The  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  398 

Tributes  of,  to  Keats,  41,  526 

Views  of,  on  Endymion,  and  vexa- 
tion caused  thereby,  150-1, 
252-3,  312 

Young  Poets,  promise  of,  noted  in 
article  of  that  title,  54,  69 

on  the  Feast  in  St  Agnes'  Eve,  401-2 

on  Hyperion,  73 

on  Isabella  ;  or,  the  Pot  of  Basil, 
473 

on  Keats's  attitude  to  Shelley,  70-1, 
72 

on  Keats's  eyes,  79 

on  Keats  and  his  poetry,  36 

on  La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci,  469 

on  Sleep  and  Poetry,  130  et  sqq. 

on  Wordsworth  at  48,  249 
Hunt,  John,  and  the  Examiner,  42 
Hunt,  Mrs  Leigh  {nSe  Kent),  43,  254 
Himt,  W.  Holman,  a  Keats  worship- 
per, 538 
Htum  of  Bordeaux,  source  of  Shake- 
speare's Oberon  and  Ti- 
tania,  87  n. 


574 


INDEX 


Hyginus,  notes  to,  in  Audores  Mytho- 

graphi,  on  Moneta,  447  &  n. 

Hymn,  A,  to  Apollo  (Keats),  56  n.,  58 

Hymn  to  IntelleduaJ  Beauty  (Shelley), 

influence  of,  on  Keats,  73 

Inspirations  of,  237 

Publication  of,  234 
Hymn  to  Pan  (Chapman),  124,  225-6 
Hymn  to  Pan  {Endymion),  quality  and 
afSnities  of,  225  et  sqq. 

Ode-form  of,  411 

Wordsworth  on,  237.  249 
Hymn  to  Pan  (Shelley),  241 
Hymns  of  Homer   (Chapman's   ver- 
sion), influence  seen  in  En- 
dymion,  206 
Hyperion  (Keats),  308,  517;  attitude 
to,  of  the  critics,  471 

Blank  verse  of,  317 

Dante's  influence  seen  in,  545 

De  Quincey's  criticism  on  (1845), 
528-9  A  n. 

Designed  as  a  romance,  its  scheme 
and  scale,  subject,  sources, 
model,  lines  from,  fine 
start,  difficulties,  and  aban-r 
donment,  426  et  sqq. 

Epic  quality  of,  333 

Feast  of  Fruits  in,  450-1,  642 

Fire  referred  to,  in.  175 

First  intimations  of,  202,  262,  334; 
first  draft  work  on,  322, 
323,  327.  333 

Germ  of  lines  in,  276 

Keats's  change  of  mind  on,  369, 
375 

Matonism  of,  399,  545 

Mistake  on,  set  right,  544 

Never  finished,  339 

Remodelling  of,  376,  379,  447-54; 
errors  made  in,  469;  the 
Induction,  450  et  sqq.; 
leading  Ideas  in,  447  et 
sqq. 

Shelley  on.  482 

Transcendental  cosmopolities  of. 
Hunt  on,  73 

Idiot  Boy,  The  (Wordsworth),  348 
'  /  had  a  dove,'  lines  for  music  (Keats), 

327 
Iliad,  The,  177 

Chapman's,  Keats's  delight  in,  and 
Sonnet  on,  38,  40  A  n.,  41, 
64,  87,  88,  133;  echoes  of, 
in  other  poems,  177,  428 
Metre  of,  86 
Strained  rimes  of,  211 
Imagination  and  Fancy  (Hunt),  Keats 
memories  in,  632 


Imagination    and    Truth,     relation 
between,     elucidated     by 
Adam's  dreams  in  Para- 
dise Lost,  154,  155 
Imagines,  of  Philostratus,  190  n. 
Imitation    of    Spenser    (Keats),    20; 

published  in  Poems,  86 
Immortality,     Keats's    attitude    to, 

345,  387,  492,  509 
Indiaman  surgeoncy,  Keats's  plan  con- 

cemmg,  355-6,  462 
Indian  Maiden,  in  Endymion,  197  et 
sqq.;    lines   cited,   229-30; 
echoes  in,  and  inspiration 
for,  33,  230  et  sqq. 
Indicator,  The,  46 

Lines  from  Cap  and  Bells  published 

in,  445 
La  Belle  Dame  published  in,  468-9 
*In      drear-nighted      December,'      an 
achievement,  386 
Date  and  association  of,  158  et  sqq. 
Model  of,  158,  160 
Text,  159 
Versions,  159  n.  2 
Induction  to 

Cdidore,  34,  111,  122,  470 
Endymion,  the  intended,  122,  164 
Hyperion,  450  et  sqq. 
Ingpen,    Roger,    his    edition    of    the 
Letters    of    Percy    Bysshe 
Shelley  cited,  482  &  n. 
Invention   and   Imagination   as   the 
prime    endowments    of    a 
Poet,     Keats's    insistence 
on,  165 
Inverary,  woods  at,  Keats  on,  288 
lona,  Keats's  visit  to,  291 
Ireby,  Keats  at,  274 

Brown's   account   of   the   dancing 
school  at,  and  Keats's  of 
the  same,  277  &  n.,  278 
Irish  Melodies  (Moore),  money-worth 

to  the  poet,  82 
Isabella  ;  or,  the  Pot  of  Basil.    A  Story 
from    Boccaccio     (Keats). 
339.  386,  396,  406,  443; 
an  achievement,  399 
Apostrophes    and   Invocations   in, 

391-2 
Beauties  of,  389,  392-3,  and  horror 
turned  to  beauty,  393  et 
sqq.,  471 
Date  of,  260,  262,  390 
Digging  scene  in,  394 

Lamb  on,  471 
Dryden  echoes  in,  392 
Induded  in  the  Lamia  volume,  470^ 

471 
Keats's  distaste  for,  366,  369 


INDEX 


575 


Isabella!  or,  the  Pot  of  BomI — continued 
Latin  usage  in,  431 
Lines  in,  on  the  bittersweet  of  love, 

360 
Metre  of,  393 
Millais'  picture  from,  538 
Reynolds's  Boccaccio  tales  intended 

for  issue  with,  259-60,  387, 

521 
Procter's  poem  on  the  same  subject, 

459 
Shelley's  delight  in,  483 
Story  of,  390 
Lamb  on,  471 
Reynolds  on,  312-13 
Wilson  on  (1828),  527 
Isle  of  Palms,  The  (Wilson),  298 
Isle  of  Wight,  Keats's  visits  to,  135-6, 

164,  357  et  sqq.,  405 
*/   stood   tip-toe    upon    a    little    hilV 

(Keats),  Cupid  and  Psyche 

reference  in,  412 
Date  of,  115,  122,  164 
Included  in  Poems,  115 
Influence  on,  of  a  passage  in  The 

Excursion,  126 
Metre,  diction  and  subject  of,  114-15 
Planned  as  Induction  to  Endymion, 

122,  164 
References  in,  to  the  Moon,  123, 166 
Scene  described  in,  36 
Italian  attitude  to  the  Sick,  506 
Literature,  Hunt's  preferences  in, 

47 
Keats's  studies  in,  370,  398 
Primitives,  Keats's  appreciation  of, 

325 
Italy,  winter  in,  planned  for  Keats, 

467,  484,  and  undertaken, 

485,  journey  to,  illness  and 

death  of  Keats,  486  et  sqq. 
It  is  an  awful  mission  (Keats),  lines 

quoted,  425 
*  It  is  a  lofty  feeling,^  sonnet  (Hunt), 

occasion  of,  56 

Jacobean"  poetry,  influence  of,  seen  in 

Endymion,  206,  207,  209  n. 
James  I.,  101 
Jasmine  Bower  scene  in  Endymion,  a 

flaw  in  the  poem,  186-7 
JefiFrey,  Francis,  editor  of  the  Edinburgh 

Review,    297;     as    critic, 

299,528 
on  Keats's  poems,  478-80,  481,  528 
on  Shelley's  poems,  528 
Jeffrey,  Miss,  letters  to,  from  Keats, 

on  going  as  Ship's  doctor, 

355-6;  on  writing  the  Ode 

to  Indolence,  415 


Jeffrey,    Mrs,    and    her    daughters, 
Keats's    friendship    with, 
262 
Jeffrey,  Mrs  (Mrs  G.  Keats),  and  the 
letters    of    Keats    to    his 
brother,  531 
Jennings,  a  common  name  in  Corn- 
wall, 5 
Jennings,     Captain    Midgley    John, 
of    the    Royal    Marines, 
uncle  of  the  poet,  5,  7,  12 
Jennings,  Frances  (Mrs  T.  Keats,  q.v., 
later  Mrs  Rawlings),  mother 
of  the  Poet,  3 
Jennings,   John,   grandfather  of   the 
poet,  3,  5 
Will  and  bequests  of,  9,  355  <6  n. 
Jennings,  John,  of  Penryn,  5 
Jennings,  Mrs  John,  grandmother  of 
Keats,  9 
Character  of,  6 

Legacy  of,  to  Keats,  354,  355  &  n. 
Trustees    appointed    by,    for    the 

Keats  children,  15-16 
Death  of,  16  <fe  n.  i 
Jennings,  Mrs  Midgley  John,  lawsuit 
by,    as    affecting    Keats, 
354,  365 
Johnson,  Dr  Samuel,  537;    Tour  of, 
m  the  Highlands,  282 
on  Greek  mythology,  220 
on  Sheridan's  pension,  481 
Jones,  Mrs,  the  mysterious,  334 
Jonson,  Ben,  poems  of.  Influence  of 
on  Keats,  206,  225,  396, 
479 
Life  of,  Keats  on,  356 
Metre  used  by,  389;  faults  in,  209 
Use  by,  of  the  Heroic  Couplet,  100 
Joseph  and  his  Brethren  (Wells),  en- 
thusiasm   for,     of    Swin- 
burne and  Rossetti,  77 
'Judgment  of  Solomon,'  picture  by 

Haydon,  60 
Julian  and  Maddalo  (Shelley),  241 
Junius,  Taylor  an  authority  on,  133 
*  Junkets,'  Keats's  nickname,  83 

Kean,  Edmund,  245,  263 

Departure  to  America,  370,  372 
Dramatic  powers  of,  442 
in    Shakespearean    parts,    Keats's 
criticisms  on,  242-4 
Keast,  Thomas,  of  St  Agnes'  parish, 

Cornwall,  5 
Keate,  Catherine,  5 
Keate,  Dr,  Headmaster  of  Eton,  4  n. 
Keats,  Edward,  3 

Keats   family   of  Dorsetshire,   4,   5, 
492 


576 


INDEX 


Keats  family  (the  poet's) 

Brotherly  affection  in,  3,  11,  13,  24, 
25,  ?l-2,  133,  135,  145, 
262,  271,  323,  324 
Keats,  Frances  Mary  (Fanny),  sister 
of  the  poet  (later  Llanos, 
q.v.),  3,  505 

Inheritance  of,  355  &  n.,  529 

Keats's  affection  for,  145 

Letters  to,  from  Keats,  charm  of, 
338;  on  being  friends,  and 
on  the  story  of  Endymion, 
147-9;  on  dancing,  336-7; 
on  fine  weather,  364-5;  on 
going  to  the  Isle  of  Wight, 
357;  on  going  as  a  Ship's 
Doctor,  355;  on  his  health 
and  on  Otho  the  Great,  381; 
on  his  idleness,  347;  in  ill- 
ness, 456;  on  keeping  well, 
487;  on  the  Scotch  tour, 
290 

Marriage  of,  535 

Verses  addressed  to,  by  Keats, 
9-10 

Visit  to,  by  Keats,  366 
Keats,  George,  brother  of  the  poet,  3, 
25,  58,  77,  162;  at  school, 
8 

Biographical  references  to,  in  order 
of  date 

Business  life  of,  24;  Money 
troubles  of,  139-40;  and 
the  Publishers  of  the  Poems, 
133;  at  Teignmouth,  with 
Tom,  244;  Marriage  and 
Emigration  of,  24,  260, 
269-72;  Business  troubles 
of,  365;  Keats's  generosity 
to,  371;  Visit  of,  to  Eng- 
land, and  Keats's  further 
generosity,  382-4;  Good 
news  from,  504;  Inherit- 
ance of,  355  n.;  Death  of, 
531 

Brotherly  devotion  of,  to  Keats,  11, 
24,  25,  82-3,  133;  Keats 
on,  356 

Brown's  indignation  with,  516, 
517,  529;  proved  unjust, 
530 

Character  of,  11,  382 

Letters  to,  from  Keats,  and  Keats's 
Journal  letters  to  him  and 
his  wife,  322-3,  327,  337, 
339;  on  becoming  a  Ship's 
surgeon,  355;  on  being  a 
Poet,  and  on  Endymion  as 
,  the  test  of  this,  164-5;  on 

his    Defenders,    315;     on 


Keats,  George — continued 
Letters  to — continued 

the  Hostile  Reviews  and  on 
his  Reading,  and  Idleness, 
340  et  sqq. ;  on  his  Brotherly 
love,   322,   323,   324;    on 
Miss  Brawne,  336;  on  Sea 
passage  to  London,  295 
Value  of,  317  ei  sqq. 
Wealth  of  topics  in  (1819),  344 
et  sqq.,  370 
on  his  Brother  as  a  boy,  11 
on  his  Grandfather  and  Mother,  6 
on  Keats's  temper,  145 
Keats,  John,  the  poet 

Acquaintancelof ,  with  Chaucer,  75  n., 
and  with  the  Elizabethans 
{q-v.),  19 
Appearance  of,  at  different  dates, 
6,  12,  24,  25,  35,  79,  80, 
143,  287,  296,  328.  346, 
347,  459  n.,  486. 
Eyes,  143,  459  n.,  466,  511 
Height,  31,  79,  80 
Portraits  of,  by 
Haydon,  462 
Severn,  328,  495,  511,  535 
Appreciation  by,  of  Wordsworth's 

poems,  125,  145-6 
Attitude  of,  to 

Criticism,  311  et  sqq.,  321 
Love,   181,   183,  213,  224,  262, 
318-20,  330  et  sqq.,  passim, 
393,  549  &  n. 
Scenery,  153,  274  et  sqq. 
Scott's  writings,  279 
Women,  81,  89-90,  262,  271,  288, 
318-20 
Biographical    projects    of    friends, 
529-31 
Biographies,     appreciation     and 
Collections  of  his  works, 
531  et  sqq. 
Memoir  of,  by  Monckton  Milnes, 
520 
Biographical  references  in  order  of 
date 
1795-1817 
Parentage,  birth  and  family,  2, 
3  et  sqq.;  school  days,  7  et 
sqq.;    boyish  amusements, 
his  lines   on,   9,    10;    in- 
dustry, 13,  and  successes, 
14;   apprenticeship  to  Mr 
Hammond,     surgeon,     16 
&  n.  2  et  sqq.;  silence  of, 
on  this  period,  17;   begin- 
nings of  poetry-writing,  17, 
18;  influences,  14, 18  et  sqq.; 
vocation  first  felt,  12,  21 


INDEX 


577 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Biographical    references — continued 

1815-17 
Life  as  medical  student,  17, 
26«fcn.,  27,  28  et  sqq.\ 
the  doctor's  life  abandoned, 
28,  83;  notebook  of,  33 
«t  n.  2 ;  Friendships  made 
and  renewed,  {see  also 
Friends,  infra),  with  Cow- 
den  Clarke,  34;  with  Leigh 
Hunt,  35-6  et  sqq.,  et  oliM, 
effect  of  the  friendship  with 
Hunt  on  his  career,  41,  51 
et  sqq.;  friendships,  formed 
through  Hunt,  59  et  sqq.; 
the  laurel  crown  episode 
and  his  verses  thereon 
then,  and  later,  55,  57-8, 
415;  verse- writing  on  a 
given  subject,  with  Hunt, 
65  et  sqq.;  at  Margate,  the 
Epistles  written  from,  37; 
first  reading  of  Chapman's 
Homer,  the  great  sonnet 
written  on  it,  38  ei  sqq.; 
walk  of,  to  the  Poultiy, 
40  n.;  Haydon's  ac- 
quaintance made,  59; 
other  new  friendships,  68 
et  sqq.;  social  surround- 
ings, 78-9;  social  sur- 
roundings, aet.  21,  78-9; 
at  a  Bear  fight,  81-2; 
growing  passion  for  the 
poetic  fife,  83 

1817 
First  book.  Poems  (q.v.),  pub- 
lished, 83  et  sqq.,  130  et  sqq. ; 
new  publishers  found,  and 
new  friends  gained,  133  et 
sqq.;  stay  in  the  Isle  of 
Wight,  Shakespeare  studies 
andworkon  Endymion,duT' 
ing,  135  et  sqq. ;  visit  to  Can- 
terbury, eflFect  of,  140;  visit 
to  Bailey  at  Oxford,  de- 
scribed by  the  latter,  143 
et  sqq.;  stay  at  Burford 
Bridge,  152,  Endymion 
finished  at,  161,  162;  end 
of  first  phase  of  mind  and 
art  of,  163 

Dec.  1817-June  1818 

Dramatic  criticism  undertaken, 
242  et  sqq.,  life  at  Hamp- 
stead,  242,  meeting  with 
Wordsworth,  246;  stay 
at  Teignmouth,  260  et 
sqq.,   429;    marriage   and 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Biographical    references — continv£d 
emigration  of  his  brother 
George,  268  et  sqq. 
June  1818-June  1819 

the  Scottish  tour  with  Brown, 
272  et  sqq.,  and  its  effect 
on  his  health,  293  et  sqq., 
384,  545;  the  attacks  on 
him  in  Blacktoood,  and 
the  Quarterly  Review,  297 
et  sqq.;  the  defence  by  his 
friends,  238,  311  e<  sqq.,  516 
et  sqq.;  effects  of,  311  et 
sqq.,  315,  316,  506,  515, 
524,  534;  the  nursing  of 
Tom  Keats  till  his  death, 
316-20;  the  attraction  of 
'Charmian,'  318-19;  life 
with  BroTNTi  at  Wentworth 
Place,  320  et  sqq.;  work 
on  Hyperion,  322,  323, 
327;  harassed  by  bor- 
rowers, 323,  337  et  sqq., 
354-5;  gift  to,  from  an 
unknown  admirer,  325; 
meeting  with  Fanny 
Brawne  and  his  love  for 
her,  329  et  sqq.,  passim, 
510,  534,  549;  financial 
position  of,  337-8,  354-5, 
lightened  by  Brown,  357; 
fight  of,  with  a  butcher- 
boy,  342-3  &  n.;  idleness, 
and  work,  342  et  sqq., 
meeting  with  Coleridge, 
346-8,  unsettlement  in 
health  and  plans,  355  et 

June  1819^Feb.  1821 

Stay  at  Shanklin  and  work  on 
Lamia  and  King  Otho, 
358  et  sqq.;  love  letters 
from,  to  Fanny  Brawne, 
360  et  sqq.;  stay  at  Win- 
chester, 362,  369;  letters 
from,  370  et  sqq.;  deter- 
mination to  work  for  the 
Press,  373;  his  financial 
position,  373;  attempted 
parting  from  Brown,  stay 
with  the  Dilkes  and  return 
to  Brown  at  Hampstead, 
374-6;  collaboration  with 
Brown,  375  et  sqq.,  387; 
fluctuating  spirits  of,  be- 
fore his  seizure,  375;  hard 
work,  375-6,  379;  inward 
sufferings,  376  et  sqq.; 
laudanum  -  taking        by 


578 


INDEX 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Biographical  references — continued 
(1819),  379,  380,  505  et 
sqq. ;  financial  position, 
at  this  time,  379;  trouble 
and  health  failure,  375 
et  sqq.;  work  of  this 
period,  436  et  sqq.;  the 
fatal  chill,  384, 455;  invalid 
life,  456  et  sqq.;  letters 
from  his  sick  bed,  455; 
slight  improvement,  460; 
relapses,  462;  at  Kentish 
Town,  463,  466,  468; 
Shelley's  invitation  to 
Italy,  467-8;  work  pub- 
lished while  at  Kentish 
Town,  268-9;  the  Lamia 
volume  issued,  470  et  sqq.y 
the  Reviews  again  severe, 
473  et  sqq.;  stay  with  the 
Brawnes,  468,  485;  winter- 
ing in  Italy  decided  on, 
with  Severn  as  companion, 
485-7;  the  voyage,  486 
et  sqq.;  life  in  Naples, 
496  et  sqq.,  and  in  Rome, 
503;  his  'posthumous 
existence,'  384,  504,  510; 
the  last  days,  505  et  sqq.; 
choice  by,  of  his  own 
epitaph,  510,  523-4; 
death,  512,  and  after, 
513  et  sqq.;  burial  place 
and  memorial  stone,  510, 
523-4;  the  *  might-have 
been'  had  he  lived,  548 
et  sqq.;  posthumous  at- 
tacks on,  in,  and  by  Black- 
wood, 519-20,  De  Quincey, 
528-9  &  n.,  and  Quarterly 
Review,  527-8;  rare  allu- 
sion by,  to  the  Reviews, 
521;  Shelley's  lament  for, 
in  Adonais,  517-19 
Character  and  characteristics 

Admiration  of,  for  Chatterton, 
146-7 

Artistic  tastes  of,  66,  92,  255-6, 
325 

in  Boyhood,  9  et  sqq.:  in  Young 
Manhood,  24,  25 

Brotherly  affection  of,  3,  11,  13, 
24.  262,  268,  271,  371, 
382-4,  see  also  Keats, 
Fanny,  George,  and  Tom 

Contrasted  with  Shelley,  72-3 

Conversation  of,  145-7,  459  n. 

Devotion  of,  to  his  Mother,  7, 
14-15 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Character,  etc, — continued 
Duality  of,  15,  318 
Early  tendency  to  rhyming,  7 
Feeling  of,  for  the  poetry  of  the 

past,  38 
Genius  of,  128-9,  234,  267-8,  484, 

550 
His    own    statements    on,    153, 

^  200-1,  223,  269,  368,  497 
Indecision,     Indefiniteness     and 

Variableness  of,  128-9, 142, 

173,  223,  269,  270,  314, 

315-16,  545 
Interest  of,  in  history  and  politics, 

371 
Keenness  of  perception,  52 
Late  awakening  of  literary  pro- 
clivities, 12 
Limitations  due  to  social  setting, 

444 
Love  of 
English  spring  flowers,  446-7 
Liberty,  foundations  of,  14 
the    Moon,    22,    123-4,    153, 

215-16  et  sqq. 
Nature,    and    its    expression    in 

his    poems,    21,    22,    36, 

79-80,   84,  90,   113,   114, 

122-3, 128, 144, 149, 152-3, 

159  et  sqq.,  216  et  sqq.,  226, 

232 
as  Lover,  seen  in  his  letters,  360 

et  sqq. 
Loyalty  to  his  given  word,  379 
Manner,  143 

Manners,  31,  32,  81,  459  n. 
as  Mimic,  81-2 
Modesty,  269,  313,  314 
Morals,  32 
Morbidity  of  Temperament,  11, 

12,  15,  80,  139,  464-5 
Naturalness  and  simplicity,  143 
Perceptiveness,  441-2 
Pride,  15,  31,  313 
Pugnacity  as  schoolboy,  10  et  sqq., 

17,  in  later  years,  17 
Reading,  and  Reading  gifts  of, 

81,366 
Wide  range  of,  88 
Religious  indefiniteness,  51,  71, 

509 
Reserve   and   inward   bitterness 

(1820),  382,  383 
Sensitiveness  as  to  his  origin,  71-2 
Skill  of,  in  friendship,  255 
Social  qualities,  powers  and  taste^ 

81-2 
as  Sportsman,  326 
Temper  of,  145 


INDEX 


579 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Character,  etc. — continued 
Tender-heartedness  &c.,  444 
Thirst  for  knowledge,  260, 265, 269 
'Vein  of  flint  and  iron'  in,  15,  315 
Voice,  81,  145 
Chief    agent    in    revitalization    of 
Greek  mythology,  220  et 
sgq. 
Critics  and  commentators  of,  540 
as  Dramatist,  441  et  sqq. 
Epitaph  of,  chosen  by  himself,  510, 
effect  of,  on  public  opinion 
on  his  Poems,  523-4 
Eulogists  of,  544-5 
Fame  of,  slow  growth  and  spread  of, 
520,  526  et  sqq.;   triumph 
of,  536,  540;   forecasts  on 
its  disabiUty,  546-8 
Favourite  flowers  of,  510 
Friends  and  Friendships  of,  see  also 
Names  of  Friends 
Estrangement  from,  in  illness,  465 
Indignation  of,  at  the  Reviews, 
309  et  sqq.,  516  et  sqq.,  522 
Love  of  his  friends,  513  et  sqq.,  521 
Loyalty  of,  long  surviving,  527 
Heir  of  the  Elizabethans,  171 
Italian  Studies  of,  370,  398 
Letters  from,  and  to,  see,  chiefly, 
under    Names    of    Corre- 
spondents,    and    E'pistles 
Bradley's  lectures  on,  545 
Compared  with  Shelley's,  541 
Dr.  Gamett  on,  541 
on    Endymion,    150,    151,    153, 
value  of,  in  the  study  of 
the  poem,  154 
Journal-letters  from,   to  George 
Keats,  value  of,  317  ef  sqq. 
Riches  of,  262  et  sqq. 
Self-revelation  in,  153-4,  371 
Library  of 
Books  in,  228  n.,  390  n.,  397  n.  i, 
447  n. 
List  of,  556  et  sqq. 
Poems  and  Verses  by,  see  also,  and 
chiefly,  under  Names 
Achievements,  385  et  sqq. 
Beauties  in,  368 
Charm  of,  119-20 
Cockneyism  charged  against  {see 
cfeoCockney  School),  109n. 
Collected 
Editions  of 
First  English,  520 
Forman's,   544,    549,    &  see 
footnotes 
,  Galignani's,  159  n.,  527 

Milnes's,  520,  531  et  sqq. 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Poems — continued 

Concordance    to,    published    by 

Cornell  University,  575 
Copy  of,  carried  about  by  Shelley, 

521,  522 
Couplet  as  used  in,  93  et  sqq., 

113-14,  207  et  sqq.,  209  n. 
Criticism  of,  easy,  119-20 
Early  writings,  22-3 
Echoes  in,  of  earlier  poets,  89, 

90  et  passim 
Elizabethan    influence    on,    389, 

479 
Essential   principle   of  versifica- 
tion, 208 
Faults  avoided  in,  209 
Faults  existing  in,  50,  186,  187, 

207  et  sqq.,  211,  212,  213, 

214-15,  221,  307,  368,  459 
Felicitous  compoimd  epithets  in, 

412-13 
Flippant  note  in,  404 
Fragments  and  experiments,  385, 

417  et  sqq. 
Insight  into  Keats's  mind  and 

genius  from,  424  et  sqq. 
Fugitive  pieces,  256-7 
Genius    in.    Evocative    not    Ex- 
pository, 128-9,  234,  267-8 
Gift  of,   to   Browning  and   the 

effect,  526 
Growing    appreciation    of,    520, 

526  et  sqq. 
Inspiration  of,  from 
Art,  54,  92,  117,  122,  200,  219, 

231  n.,    264,    414-16  <fe  n., 

417  446 
Nature,  21-2,  122-3 
Sources,  nature  of,  165-6 
Last  lines  written  by,  435 
Latest  Eulogists  of,  545 
Lectures  on,  of  Mackail,  545 
Lyric  experiments,   157  et  sqq., 

386 
Mental  experiences  worked  into, 

173 
Method  of  composition,  143-4 
Metres  and  Styles  used  in,  109-10, 

210-11,  258,  286  n.,  287, 

345,  349,  350  &  n.  2,  386, 

387,  414 
Models  of,  see  Echoes,  supra,  see 

also  Elizabethan,  &  Hunt 
Naturalness  of,  395 
Nature  of,  541 

Nature  Poems,  see  Endymion 
Odes  written  m  1819,  352  et  sqq.    , 
Opinions  on,  in  the  early  '40's, 

628 


y 


580 


INDEX 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Poems — continued 

Poems,  published,  85  et  sqq. 

Poor  sale  of,  526,  528 

Posthumous,  two  printed  in 
Mihies's  book,  537 

in  progress  and  written  in  eariy 
1819,  339 

Promise  in,  of  Dramatic  and 
Ironic  power,  222 

Publishing  schemes  (1819),  366 

Referring  to  his  love  for  Fanny 
Brawne,  334  et  sqq. 

Revision  of,  uncertainty  and  un- 
wisdom shewn  in,  469 

Runes  used  by,  119,  210-11,  307 

Self-expression  in,  222-3,  411 

Snatches  expressive  of  Moods, 
424-5 

Speculative  and  symbolic  mean- 
ings underiying,  the  key 
to,  153-4 

Steriing's  appreciation  of,  528 

Technique  of,  see  also  Metre, 
Rime,  Ac,  88 

Thackeray's  allusion  to,  538 

Unquenchable  by  literary  work 
done  on  them,  546 

Unwritten,  his  distress  over,  534, 
548 

Value  of,  to  the  reader,  546,  548 
as  Poet,  Milnes's  words  on,  536 
Poetic  impulses,   causes  checking, 

in  1819,  339,  340,  437 
Political  interests  and  views  of,  14, 

25,371 
Portraits    of,    by    Haydon,    462, 
Severn,  328,  495,  511,  533 
Reflections  by,  ethical  and  cosmic, 

344-5 
Spirit  of  poetry  and  pleasantness 
retained  by,  to  the  end,  511 
Sayings 

on  Abandoning  Hyperion,  and 
on  its  Miltonisms,  436; 
on  Beauty  and  Truth, 
'-^  418;  on  Brotherly  affec- 
tion, 271;  on  Brown's 
regular  habits,  281;  on 
Bailey's  appetite  for  books, 
133-4;  on  the  Black- 
vxxyd  article  on  Hunt, 
152;  on  Fanny  Brawne's 
appearance  &c.,  329;  on 
Brown's  rummaging  out 
his  old  sonnets,  354  n.; 
on  Devonshire  weather 
and  folk,  260-1,  262;  on 
the  Effect  of  the  Reviews 
on  the  public,  340-1;    on 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Sayings — continued 

Endymion,  his  aims  in, 
165,  237,  his  dissatis- 
faction with  it,  150,  and 
its  defence  by  his  iriends, 
314-15,  on  its  theme, 
148;  on  Endymion's  con- 
fession, 180;  on  George 
Keats's  money  troubles, 
371;  on  Hazlitt's  Shake- 
spearean Lectures,  68;  on 
lus  ambitions  as  Poet,  324; 

'—  on  his  feelings  on  life  and 
literature,  364;  on  his 
own  attitude  to  women, 
288;  on  his  own  capacity 
for  judging  paintings,  256; 
on  his  own  character, 
153-4,  200-1,  223,  497,  as 
^~.  poet,  269,  314-15;  on  his 
'  own  need  of  Poetry,  136; 
on  his  own  place  in  Poetry, 
543;  on  his  plans  for 
Hyperion,  426;  on  his  own 
pride  &c.,  368;  on  his 
poetry,  and  determination 
never  to  write  for  writing's 
sake  or  for  a  livelihood, 
339-40;  on  his  poetry- 
writing  idleness,  (1819), 
342, 348,  349,  352,  353;  on 
his '  posthumous  existence,* 
505-6,  510;  on  his  sensa- 
tions in  ordinary  society, 
326;  on  his  own  skill  as 
operator,  29;   on  his  state 

„^of  mind  in  1819,  356,  380, 
491-2;  on  his  unwritten 
poems,  534,  548;  on  his 
wishes  as  to  future 
work  (Nov.  1819),  380-1; 
on  his  work  on  the  Ode 
to  Psyche,  413-14;  on  the 
Ireby  dancing-school,  277 
&  n.,  278;  on  the  Lasinio 
engravings,  325;  on  a 
mawkish  popularity,  313; 
on  his  Nile  sonnet  and 
other  writings  (1818),  256; 
on  the  quarrels  of  his 
friends,  255;  on  the 
Quarterly's  attack  and  its 
good  results,  326;  on  his 
reading,  and  on  his  mental 
state  (1819),  341,  342; 
on  the  Scotch  tour,  289; 
on  Sickness,  in  the  lighter 
vein,  263;  on  some  friction 
with    Hunt    and    others, 


INDEX 


581 


Keats,  John,  the  poet — continued 
Sayings — continued 

150-1;  on  street  quarrels, 
81 ;  on  three  witty  friends, 
383;  on  Winchester  ways, 
371;  on  Wordsworth  in 
1817, 250,  on  his  dogmatism 
and  Hmit's,  252-3,  on  his 
genius  and  Milton's,  266 
Keats,  Mrs  George  {nie  Wylie,  q.v., 
later  Mrs  Jeffrey),  323,  365 
Keats's  pleasant  relations  with,  270, 

271 
Letter  to,  from  Keats,  383 
Remarriage  of,  531 
Keats,  Mrs  Thomas  {n^e  Jennings), 
mother  of  the  poet,  3 
Appearance  and  character  of,  6-7 
Devotion  to,  of  Keats,  7,  14, 15 
Second  marriage  of,  8-9 
Death  of,  14,  15 
Keats,  Sir  Richard  Godwin,  of  the 

'Superb,'  4 
Keats,  Thomas,  father  of  the  poet, 
2-3,5 
Characteristics  of,  6 
Death  of,  8 

Origin  of,  Senora  Llanos  on,  3 
Keats,  Thomas  (Tom),  brother  of  the 
poet,  3,  135,  137,  280,  466, 
505 
Hi-health    of,    Keats's    devotion 
during,  15,  162,  244,  262, 
269,  295,  316  et  sqq.,  333, 
426 
Letters  to,  from  Keats,  on  Fingal's 
cave,    292,    and    on    his 
health,  293;   on  the  Lake 
District,  275-6;    on  Scot- 
tish   Society,    Economics 
and  Racial  character,  281-3 
Wells's  hoax  of,  77,  346 
Death  of,  15,  320,  322,  387 
Keats,  D.  J.  Llanos  y,  artist,  son  of 

Fanny  Keats,  535-6 
Keats  Crescent,  Shanklin,  358  n. 
Keats,   the  name,   its   variants   and 

locales,  3-5 
Keats-Shelley  Memorial  at  Rome,  542; 

Bulletin  of,  16  n.,  510  n. 
*Keen,  fitful  gu^ts  are  whispering  here 
and  there,'  sonnet  (Keats), 
52,  included  in  Poems,  90 
Kelmscott    Press    edition    of   Keats, 
and  the  restoration  of  the 
text  of  La  Belle  Dame,  470 
Kendal,  Keats  at,  273 
Kent,  Miss  (Mrs  Leigh  Hunt),  43 
Kentish  Town,  Keats's  stay  in,  and 
health  during,  463 


Ker,  Prof.  W.  P.,  suggestion  of,  on 
source  of  Keats's  'Magic 
casements '  lines,  291  An. 

Kerrera,  and  the  Goylen  legend,  291 

Kete,  meaning  of,  4 

King  Lear,  words  from,  used  by 
Keats,  285  (fen. 

King  Stephen,  dramatic  fragment 
(Keats),  364,  370,  443 

Kingston,    ,    and    Wordsworth, 

246-7,  251 

Kirkmen,  the,  Keats  on,  282-3 

Kirkup,  Seymour,  at  Florence,  523 

Knighfs  Tale  (Chaucer),  metre  of,  94 

KuUa  Khan  (Coleridge),  288 
Echo  of,  in  Endymion,  230 

La  belle  Dame  sans  Merci  (Keats), 
an  achievement,  350 
Date  of,  370,  441 
Included  in  Milnes's  Book,  537 
Morris,  WUUam,  on,  470 
Publication  of,  alterations  in,  and 

notices  of,  468-70 
Rossetti  on,  439 
Subject,  perfection,  and  metre  of, 

350  *n. 
Transcript  of,  by  Brown,  469  &  n. 
True  version,  given  in  fiill,  351-2 
Lai  d'Aristote,  33 

Ladye,  The,  of  Provence  (Reynolds),  333 
Laidlaw,  William,  Scott,  and  Black- 
wood, 304 
Laira  Green,  Brown's  life  at,  530 
Lake  District,  places  visited  in,  by 
Keats  with  Brown,  272-3 
et  sqq. 
Lake    School    Poets,    morbidity    as- 
scribed  to,  by  Hunt,  121 
Lalla  Rookh  (Moore),  price  paid  for, 

82;  popularity  of,  313 
Lamb,  Charies,  388 

Appearance,  conversation  and  habits 

of,  69,  246  et  sqq.,  327 
and  the  Baby,  370-1 
Champion  of  the  Poetic  Revolution, 

119 
and  the  Enfield  stiles,  18 
Friendship  of,  with 
Haydon,  62 
Hunt,  43 
Keats,  69 
Parties  of,  given  with  Mary,  68 
Publishers  of,  131 
Verse-letters  to,  from  Hunt,  51 
Works  of,  two  volume  ed.  of  1818, 
Fuller's  Holy  State  quoted 
in  Specimens,  388  &  n. 
on  the  Digging  Scene  in  Isabella, 
395,  471 


582 


INDEX 


Lamb,  Charles — continued 

on  Keats's  place  in  poetry,  484 
on  the  Lamia  volume  poems,  471; 

the  pick  of,  395  n. 
on  Shelley,  70 
Lamb,  Dr,  466 
Lamb,  Mary,  43,  68 
Lambeth,  Brown's  birthplace,  142 
>j{^  Lamia  (Keats),  239,  370,  386,  405,  421 
'^      Keats  on,  after  re-reading,  372 
Keats's  reading  of,  366 
Keats's  wish  for  instant  publication 

of,  366 
Place  of,  in  the  volume  of  1820, 

115  n. 
Publication  of,  with  other  poems, 
463 
Full  title  and  contents,  470-1 
Reception  of,  and  criticisms  on,  471 

et  sqq.,  481 
Subject,  source,  metre  and  form  of, 

358,  404-10 
Hunt  on,  404-10 
Lamb  on,  and  other  critics,  471  et 

Wilson  on  (1828),  527 
d^  Lamia,    Isabella,    and    other    Poem^, 
'  Keats's    inunortality    se- 

cured by,  470 
Byron's  fury  over,  481 
Gift  of,  by  Keats  to  Shelley,  468 
Passage     singled     out    from,     by 

Lamb,  395  n. 
Publication  of,  463,  470-1 
Publishers'   note  in,   disowned  by 
Keats,  463 
Lancaster,  Keats  at,  271 
Land,  The,  East  of  the  Sun  (Morris), 

438 
Landon,  Letitia,  verse  of,  526 
Landor,    Walter    Savage,    530;     ad- 
mirer of  Keats's  poems,  523 
on  Milnes's  book,  537 
Landseer,  Sir  Edwin  Henry,  at  Hay- 
don's,  246 
Land's  End,  Keats's  father  said  to  have 

come  from,  3 
Lang,  Andrew,  on  errors  in  Criticism, 
308 
on  the  'gallipots'  article,  308,  309-10 
Lanteglos,  the  Keats  of,  5 
Laon  and  Cythna  (Shelley),  73 
Lara  (Byron),  form  used  in,  108 
Lasinio,  engravings  by,  Keats's  delight 

in,  325 
Laureation  or  Intercoronation  affair, 
reference  to,  in  the  Ode  to 
Indolence  (Keats),  415 
Sonnets  on,  by 
Hunt,  56 


Laureation  aflPair — continued 
Keats,  57,  91,  307 

Amplification  of,  in  Endymion, 
57-8,  189 

Law  Life  Insurance  Society,  Wood- 
house's  connection  with, 
134 

Lawn  Bank,  Hampstead,  321  n. 

Lawrence,  Sir  Thomas,  501 

Lay  Sermons  (Coleridge),  134 

Lay,  The,  oftheLastMinstrel{S>cott),S% 

Leander,  sonnet  on  (Keats),  see  On  a 
Picture  of  Leander 

Leander  gems  of  Tassie,  92  &  n.  2 

Lea  Valley,  in  Keats's  day,  21-2 

Leicester,  Earl  of,  Keats's  notion  of, 
writing  about,  381 

Lelant,  the  name  Jennings  at,  5 

Le  Sage,  name  'Sangrado'  borrowed 
from,  309  n. 

Letter  to  William  Gifford,  Esq.  (Haz- 
litt),  341 

Letters  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley,  ed. 
Ingpen,  482  n. 

Liberal,  The,  Brown's  contributions 
to,  522 

*Libertas,'  Hunt's  sobriquet,  44 

L.S.A.  degree,  obtained  by  Keats,  27 

Life  of  Dry  den  (Scott),  45 

Life  of  Joseph  Severn  (Sharp),  new 
knowledge  of  Keats  given 
in,  545 

Life,  Letters,  and  Literary  Remains 
of  John  Keats,  edited  by 
Richard  Monckton  Milnes 
(1848),  520,  531  et  sqq. 

Life  of  Scott,  by  Lockhart,  310 

Lindo,    (later    Lindon,    ), 

husband  of  Fanny  Brawne, 
535 

Lindon,  Mrs,  see  Brawne,  Fanny 

Line  endings  of  couplets 

Closed  or  open,  varieties  of  usage, 

94  et  sqq. 
Double,   objections  to,   and  usual 
employment  of,    103;    il- 
lustrated, 104 

Lines  composed  a  few  miles  above 
T intern  Abbey  (Words- 
worth), Keats  on,  267 

Lines  on  the  Mermaid  Tavern  (Keats), 
258;  date  and  metre  of, 
327,  386;  hints  on  im- 
mortality in,  387;  in- 
cluded in  the  Lamia 
volume,  470 

Lines  toritten  in  the  Highlands  after 
a  Visit  to  Bums's  Country 
(Keats),  285;  metre  and 
interest  of.  286  «fe  n. 


INDEX 


583 


Lisbon,  Keats's  scheme  of  a  visit  to, 
151,  abandoned,  162 

List  of  Books  in  Keats's  Library,  390  n., 
397  n.,  556  et  sqq. 

Literary  Criticism,  cruelty  of,  early 
19th  century,  299  et  sqq. 

Literary  ladies  and  'the  Matchless 
Orinda,'  150 

Literary  Pocket  Book  (Himt),  324 

Little  Britain,  the  Reynolds'  House  in, 
74,288 

Littlehampton,  the  Reynolds'  at,  147 

Live  Pets,  Keats  on  keeping,  10,  338 

Llanos,  Fanny  {nSe  Keats),  535 
Civil  List  pension  secured  for,  by 

Forman,  536 
Death  of,  in  ripe  years,  536 
on  the  Cornish  origin  of  her  father,  3 

Llanos,  Valentine,  husband  of  Fanny 
Keats,  535 

Loch  Awe,  Keats  on  the  first  sight  of, 
289 

Loch  Fyne,  doggerel  verses  on  (Keats), 
288 

Loch  Lomond,  Keats  on,  287-8 

Locker-Lampson,  Frederick,  on  Sefiora 
Llanos  and  her  husband, 
536 

Lockharts,  the,  Scotch  tour  of,  290-1 

Lockhart,  John  Gibson,  co-editor  of 
BlacktDood,    partisan     ex- 
cesses of,  298,  525-6,  and 
later  regrets,  299,  310 
Article    attributed    to,    in    error, 

528  n.  I 
Challenge  of,  to  John  Scott,  519 
and  the  Death  of  Keats,  current 

belief  as  to,  525-6 
Keats's  death-bed  saying  on,  521 
at  Weimar,  298,  309 

London  Magazine,  The,  and  its  editor- 
publisher,  133,  311,  519 

Lord  Byron  and  some  of  his  Contem- 
poraries  (Himt,  1828), 
Keats's  memories  in,  36, 
532 

Louisville,  Kentucky,  George  Keats's 
death  at,  531 

Love,  effect  of,  on  Keats,  332,  334  et 
sqq. 
Keats's  conception  and  treatment 
of,    181,    183,    213,    221, 
393,  549  &  n. 

Love  and  Death,  Keats's  double  goal, 
112,  336,  344,  362,  375 

Love  and  Marriage,  Keats's  early  fears 
of,  and  attitude  to,  262, 
318-20,  justified,  330  et  sqq. 


vassim 


Love  and  War,  Poetry  of,  221 


Lover's  complaint.  A,  sonnet  (Keats), 
when  written,  492-4 

Lowell,  James  Russell,  540 

Lowther  family,  and  the  Election  of 
1818,  272,  274 

Lucas,  ,   surgeon,   described  by 

South,     29;      Keats     as 
dresser  to,  27 

Lucas,  E.  v.,  debt  to,  as  concerning 
Charles  Lamb,  471  n. 

Lucy,  Wordsworth's  poem  on,  Keats 
on,  146 

Lulworth  Cove,  landing  at,  492,  494 

Lyddas  (Milton),  19,  262 
Adonais  compared  with,  517 
Echoed  by  Keats,  111,  431 
Lyric  effects  in,  122 

Lyly,  John,  prose  comedy  of  Endi- 
mion,  by  167,  allegorical 
nature  of,  168  n. 

Lyrical  Ballads  of  Coleridge  and 
Wordsworth,  21,  poetical 
revolution  introduced  by, 
108,  118,  119,  207 

Lyrical  effect  attempted  by  Keats  in 
/  stood  tip-toe,  and  else- 
where, 122 

Lyrics,  in  Endymion,  in  relation  to  the 
Classics  and  Elizabethan 
poets,  224  et  sqq. 

'Macbeth,'  picture  by  Haydon, 
60 

Macfarlane,  Charles,  on  Keats  and 
the  scentless  roses,  501, 
and  on  the  macaroni 
eaters,  502  &  n. 

Mackail,  J.  W.,  Lectures  of,  on  Keats's 
poetry,  545;  on  the  Mys- 
tic Shell  in  Endymion  & 
in  The  Prelude,  196  &  n. 

Mackereth,  George  Wilson,  fellow- 
student  of  Keats,  30,  176 

Mackintosh,  Sir  James,  and  Endy- 
mion, 313 

Macpherson,  James,  and  the  pseudo- 
Ossian  poems,  107 

M'Cracken,  H.  Noble,  article  by, 
referred  to,  398  n. 

Macready,  WiUiam  Charles,  in  BMri- 
bution,  Keats's  criticism  on, 
242 

Mad  Banker  of  Amsterdam,  comic 
poem  (Lockhart),  309 

Madeline,  in  the  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  401 
et  sqq.,  et  alibi 

Mad  Mother,  The  (Wordsworth),  121 

Madness,    from   ecstasy,    Keats   on, 
257 
Keats's  fear  of,  lines  on,  425 


584 


INDEX 


*  Magic  casements'   phrase,   possible 

sources  of,  264-5,  291 
Maginn,  William,  critical  ferocity  of, 

137;    insolent  article  and 

parody    by,    on    Adonais, 

519-20 
Maid's  Tragedy  (Beaumont  and  Flet- 
cher),     341;       Endymion 

references  in,  168 
Man,  relations  of  to  Nature,  Words- 
worth's exposition  of,  128, 

129 
Man,  The,  Bom  to  be  King  (Morris), 

438 
Man,  The,  in  the  Moone  (Drayton), 

echoes  from,  in  Endymion, 

169  et  sqq. 
Manfred  (Byron),  302 
Margaret  (Wordsworth),  121 
Margate,  letters  from,  by  Keats,  to, 

various  friends,  137  et  sqq. 
Maria  Crowther,  ship  which  took  Keats 

to  Italy,  486,  488,  fellow- 
passengers  on,  488-9,  490, 

495,  496,  498 
Marlowe,  Christopher,  poems  by,  169, 

Endymion    lines    in,    67; 

use    in,    of    the    Heroic 

couplet,  96-7 
Marvell,    Andrew,    use    by,    of    the 

Heroic  couplet,  102 
Mathew,    Ann,    and    Caroline,    24; 

Keats's  verses  to,  23, 24, 86 
Mathew,  George  Felton,  Epistle  to, 

by   Keats,  93,   109  dc  n., 

110,  470 
on  Keats  in  early  manhood,  24-5, 

and  on  his  appearance,  25 
Maurice,    Rev.    Frederick    Denison, 

editor  of  The  Athenaeum,  52 
Measure  for   Measure,    words   from, 

used  in  Endymion,  201 
Mediaeval  Mythology,  vitality  of,  to 

Keats,  110 
Mediaevalism  of  Keats,  439-41 
Medwin,  T.,  Letter  to,  from  Fanny 

Brawne,  on  Keats  and  his 

passions,  330  n.,  465  &  n. 
on  Shelley's  views  on  the  poems  in 

the  Lamia  volume,  482-3 
Meg    Merrilees,    Ballad    of    (Keats), 

279-80,  386 
Melody  in  verse,  and  the  Vowel  sounds, 

Keats's  ideas  on,  147,  209, 

401-2 
MeTnorials   of   a    Tour   in   Scotland, 

poems  (Wordsworth),  387 

<fr  n. 
'Me  rather  all  that  bowery  loneliness* 

alcaics  (Tennyson),  38 


Mermaid  Tavern,  verses  on,  see  *  Lines 
on  the  Mermaid  Tavern' 

Metamorphoses  (Ovid),  in  Sandys's 
translation,  source  of 
Keats's  mythological 
knowledge,  171,  174  n.,  in- 
fluence of  in  Endymion, 
190,  195,  201,  206 

Metre,  decay  of,  100 

Metres  employed  by  Keats,  86;  Keats's 
revolutionary  treatment 
of,  207  et  sqq. 

Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  86; 
source  of  Oberon  &c.  in, 
87  n. 

Milanese  pictiu-es,  engravings  of,  325 
A  n. 

"Milky  Way"  of  poetry.  Quarterly's 
phrase  on  Keats's  work, 
528 

Mill,  James,  and  Hunt,  43 

Millais,  Sir  John  Everett,  the  Italian 
Primitives  and  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  Brotherhood, 
325;  a  Keats  worshipper, 
538 

Milman,  H.  H.,  263 

Milnes,  Monckton  (Lord  Houghton, 
q.v.).  Memoir  of  Keats  by, 
620,  sources,  531  et  sqq., 
merit  and  timeliness,  gaps 
and  errors  in,  and  recep- 
tion of,  336  et  sqq. 

Milton,  John,  and  the  Faithful 
Shepherdess,  168 
Genius  of,  relative  to  that  of  Words- 
worth, Keats  on,  266; 
Keats  compared  with,  by 
Landor,  537 
Hair    of.    Lines    on,    by    Keats, 

257 
Poems  of.  Brown's  travelling  book, 
272 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  and  Keats's 
study  of,   195,   262,  386, 
399,  428,  429,  430-6,  545 
Model  for  English  epic  poetry, 

429 
Sprightly  lines  in,  109  n. 
Use  in,  of  the 
Heroic  couplet,  101-2 
SiciUan   pastoral    elegy   form, 
517 

Minstrel,  The  (Beattie),  19 

*  Minutes  are  flying,'  see  On  Receiving 
a  Laurel  Crown  from  Leigh 
Hunt 

Mitford,  Mary  Russell,  friend  of 
Haydon,  62,  his  letter  to 
her,  on  Keats's  death,  521 


INDEX 


585 


Mnemosyne,  In  Hyperion,  429,  433  et 

sqq.,  passim 
Mole  river,  in  Keats's  poem,  159 
Moneta,  in  Hyperion,  447  &  n.,  450 
Monitress,  the,  in  Hyperion,  453-4 
Monkhouse,  Cosmo,  246 
Montagu,  Basil,  on  Keats's  poems,  41 
Monthly  Chronicle,  The,  53 
Monthly    Review,     354  n.;     on    the 

Lamia  volmne,  474 
Moods,   Keats  on,   265,   269,   270-1, 

344,    348;     his    suflferings 

from,  359  et  sqq.,  passim 
Moon,  the,  Keats's  attitude  to,  123, 

166-7,  189;    fine  lines  on, 

in  Endymion,  215-16 
Moore,  Thomas,  86,  518 

Poems  of.  Hunt's  verdict  on,  44 
Lines  on  the  Hunts  in  prison,  43 
Popularity  of  Lalla  Rookh,  313 
Sums  received  for,  82 
Prose  works,  see  Epicurean,  &  Tom 

Cribb's  Memorial 
Verse-letter  to,  from  Hunt,  50-1 
Morgan  MSS.,  366  n.,  477  n. 
Morning    Chronicle,    attitude    of,    to 

Endymion,  311 
Morris,  Harrison  S.,  on  Keats's  choice 

of  epitaph,  510  n. 
Morris,  William,  anticipations  of,  by 

Keats,  438-9 
True  text  of  La  Belle  Dame,   re- 
stored by,  470 
Poems   of,   inspiration   and   model 

for,  539 
on  Keats's  poetry,  470,  539 
Moschus,  his  elegy  on  the  death  of 

Bion,  517,  518 
Mother    Hubbard's     Tale     (Spenser), 

Heroic  couplet  used  in,  96 
Mountain  Scenery  as  Inspiration  for 

a  Poet,  Keats's  rare  phrase 

on,  284 
Mull,  Keats's  expedition  to,  291,  and 

the    first    failure    of    his 

health,  293 
Murray,  A.  S.,  on  the  inspiration  of  the 

Ode  to  a  Grecian  Urn,  416  n. 
Murray,  John,  and  Blackvxyod,  302; 

and  the  Quarterly  Review, 

297 
Muse  of  his  Native  Land,  address  to, 

in  Endymion,  197 
MusSe  Napoleon,  The,  classic  prints  in, 

Keats's  tracing  from,  416 

<fe  n. 
*My  spirit  is  too  weak,'  see  On  Seeing 

the  Elgin  Marbles 
Mythology,    Greek    and    Mediaeval, 

vitality  of,  to  Keats,  110 


NAIAD,  The  (Reynolds),  74 

Naples,  Keats  in  quarantine  at,  496, 
ill-effects  of,  498 

Napoleon  L,  416  &  n.;  aggressions  of, 
effect  on  the  Lake  poets, 
45 
Art  collection  of,  416  «fe  n. 

Narensky,  opera  (Brown),  359 

Nature,  attitude  to,  of  Keats,  and  its 
influences  as  seen  in  his 
poems,  21-2,  79-80,  114, 
122-3,  189,  215-16  et 
alibi 

'Nature,  red  in  tooth  and  claw' 
(Tennyson),  Keats's  anti- 
cipation of,  448-9 

Negative  capability,  Keats  on,  253-4 

Nelson,  Admiral  Lord,  4 

Newcome,  Colonel,  in  The  Newcomes, 
and  his  son's  views  on 
Keats,  537 

Newmarch, ,  and  Keats,  32 

New  Monthly  Magazine,  Colbum's, 
review  in,  of  the  Lamia 
volume,  473-4 

Newport,  Isle  of  Wight,  Reynolds's 
County  Court  post  at,  533 

New  Times,  Lamb's  critique  in,  of  the 
Lamia  volume,  471-2 

Newton,  Sir  Isaac,  in  Haydon's  pic- 
ture, 247,  462 

New  York  Herald,  1889,  Recollections 
of  Fanny  Brawne,  by  a 
cousin,  published  in,  330  n. 

New  Zealand,  Brown's  death  in, 
531 

Nile,  the,  sonnets  on,  by  Shelley, 
Keats,  and  Hunt,  256 

Nodes  AmbrosianoB  (Wilson),  on 
Keats's  poems  (1828),  527  n.  3 
Wordsworth,  300 

Northampton,  Countess  of,  death  of, 
Scott's  grief  at,  525 

Northcote,  James,  on  the  ass  in  Hay- 
don's painting,  461 

'Not  Aladdin  Magian'  (Keats),  re- 
ferring to  Fingal's  Cave, 
292-3 

Notes  on  Gilfillah's  Literary  Portraits 
(De  Quincey),  outburst  in, 
against  Keats,  528-9  *  n. 

Novello,  Mary  Victoria,  see  Clarke, 
Mrs  Charles  Cowden 

Novello,  Vincent,  musical  parties  of, 
Keats  at,  327,  328 

'Nymph  of  the  Downward  smile,'  sonnet 
(Keats),  addressed  to  Miss 
Wylie,  and  included  in 
Poems,  89,  270 

Nymphs,  The  (Hunt),  138 


586 


INDEX 


OBERON  (Wieland),  Sotheby's  transla- 
tion of,  86-7  A  n.,  309 
Modified  Spenserian  stanza  in,  445 
Oberon  and  Titania,  Keats's  lines  on, 
and  possible  sources,  86, 
87  &n. 
Ocean  floor  theme,  in  Endymion,  in 
relation     to     Shakespeare 
and  Shelley,  189,  239 
Oceanus  (Hyperion),  speech  of,  433-4 
Ode  to  Apollo  (Keats),  23 
Ode  to  Autumn  (Keats),  386;  date  of, 
370,    421;     form,    perfec- 
tions, and  lines  from,  421-3 
Greek  influence  seen  in,  426 
Ode  to  Fanny  (Keats),  as  a  cry  of  the 
heart,  334;    date  of,  334, 
339;    lines  from,   quoted, 
335-6 
Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn  (Keats),  IJ 

386,   4^,   a  masterpiece\ 
inspiration,   sources,   sub-] 
ject,   &c.,  232,  .26<  4^ 
416  &  n.,  417-18 
Date  of,  352,  353 
Ode  to  Hope  (Keats),  23 
Ode   on    Intimations    of   Immortality 
(Wordsworth),  Keats's  com- 
ment on,  145-6,  159  n. 
Ode  on  Indolence  (Keats),  386;  .date 
of,  352,  353  f 

Echo  from,  356  ; 

Greek  influence  seen  in,  414  * 
Keats's  pleasure  in  writing,  415 
lanes  on  Visions  in,  probable  source 

of,  412  n. 
Not  included  in  the  Lamia  volume, 
470 
Ode  to  Maia  (Keats),  unfinished,  265; 
Greek   influence   seen   in, 
426;      included     in     the 
Lamia  volume,  470 
Ode    on    Melancholy    (Keats),    386; 
date  of,  352,  354,  419 
Embryo  ideas  of,  259  n. 
Subject  and  splendours  of,  419-21 
OdetoaNighiingale(Ke&ts),2G3,d8S,422 
Date  of,  352,  353-4,  418 
Echoes  in,  344,  418 
Embryo  ideas  of,  259  n. 
Hippocrene  passage  in,  542 
Keats's  genius  at  its  height  in,  419 
Inspirations  of,  264-5 
Line  in,  anticipated,  344 
Publication  of,  354 
Ode  to  Psyche   (Keats),  386;    date, 
352,  411,  441 
Germ  of  lines  in,  276 
Sources,  qualities,  faults  and  beau- 
ties, 411,  412  A  n.,  413-14 


Odes  and  Addresses  by  Eminent  Hands 

(Hood  and  Reynolds),  533 
Odes    (Keats),    in    Lamia    volume, 

470 
Odes,  the  six  (Keats),  308 
Dates  of,  411  et  sqq.,  441 
Metre  and  form  of,  411-13,  414-15 
Odes,    The,  of  Keats   (Downer),   Urn 

illustrated  in,  416  n. 
Odyssey     (Chapman's     version),     in- 
fluence seen  in  Endymion, 

206 
Use  in,  of  the  Heroic  couplet,  99 
*0  fret   not   afler   knowledge — /  have 

none,'  lines  by  Keats,  260, 

424 
'  0  golden-tongued  Romance  with  serene 

lute,'  sonnet  (Keats),  date 

and  subject  of,  257 
Old  Plays  (Dodsley),  Dilke's  continua- 
tion of,  142 
Oilier  Brothers,  publishers  for  Shelley^ 

Keats  and  others,  83,  263; 

and  the  unsuccess  of  Poems, 

131,  133 
Oilier,  Charles,  sonnet  by,  on  Poems, 

131 
Oilier,  James,  on  the  public  attitude 

to  Poems,  133 
'0    Melancholy,    linger   here   awhile,' 

Invocation     in     Isabella, 

beauties  of,  392 
*0   mighty-mouthed   inventor   of  har- 
monies'     (Tennyson),      a 

Keats  anticipation  of,  237 
On  first  looking  into  Chapman's  Homer, 

sonnet  (Keats),  38, 40  <fc  n., 

41,54 
Full  text  of,  88 
Included  in  Poems,  133 
Technical  perfection  of,  87 
On  the  Grasshopper  and  Cricket,  sonnet 

(Keats),  55;    included  in 

Poems,  91 
On  Leaving  Some  Friends  at  an  Early 

Hour,  sonnet  (Keats),  90 
On  Leigh  Hunt's  Poem  'The  Story  of       , 

Rimini,'    sonnet    (Keats), 

91 
On  the  Peace  of  Paris  (1814),  sonnet 

(Keats),  23,  44,  91 
On  [an  engraved  Gem  of]  Leander,  sonnet 

(Keats),  92  A  nn.  I  &  2 
On  Receiving  a  Laurel   Crown  from 

Leigh  Hunt,  sonnet  (Keats), 

57 
On  Receiving  a  Curious  Shell  and  a 

Copy  of  Verses  [from  some 

Ladies],    stanza    (Keats), 

metre  of,  86 


INDEX 


687 


On  the  Sea,  sonnet  (Keats),  written  at 
Carisbrooke,  135 

On  seeing  the  Elgin  Marbles,  sonnet 
(Keats),  66     ^  ^ 

On  sitting  down  to  read  King  Lear  once 
again,  sonnet  (Keats),  257 

Opposites,  A  Song  of  (Keats),  263,  389 

Optics  and  the  Poet,  400-1 

Orcagna,  picture  by,  possibly  inspiring 
Keats,  446 

Orlando  Innamorato  (Boiardo),  552 

*0  Solitude  I  if  I  vnth  thee  must  dwell* 
sonnet  (Keats),  35  <£  n.; 
included  in  Poems,  90 

Othello  (Shakespeare),  Kean's  voice 
in,  Keats  on,  243 

Oiho  the  Great,  a  tragedy  by  Keats  and 
Brown,  357,  359,  364,  421, 
an  experiment,  386,  441 
Admiration  for,  at  Rome,  526 
First  printed,  537 
Plot,  construction  and  poetry  of, 

442-3 
Production  of,  difficulties  on,  370, 
372,  381 

Ottava  rima,  used  by  Byron,  390 

Ovid,  Arethusa  myth  as  told  by,  187 
Cosmology  of,  174  <t  n. 
Echoes  of,  in  Endymion,  168,  171, 

174  &  n.,  185, 187,  201 
Metamorphoses  of,  in  Sandys's  trans- 
lation, value  of,  to  Keats, 
171,  174  n,;  influence  seen 
in  Endymion,  190,  195, 
201,206 

Owen,  Mrs  F.  M.,  Study  by,  on  Endy- 
mion, 544 

Oxford,  Keats's  visit  to,  142,  429;  his 
own  words  on,  143  et  sqq. 
Endymion,  partly  written  at,  143-4, 
147 

Oxford  Herald,  Endymion  praised  in, 
by  Bailey,  270 

Oxford  University  Press,  Delegates  of, 
edition  issued  by,  of  La 
Belle  Dame,  469  <fe  n. 

PAIN»  THE,  of  Memory,  a  variant  of 
In  drear-nighted  December, 
third  stanza  of,  158  n.      "^ 

Palgrave,  F.  T.,  admiration  of,  for 
the  sonnet  Woman,  when 
I  behold  thee  flippant,  vain, 
89;  place  given  by,  to 
Lamia,  406 
on  Keats's  Poems  {Golden  Treasury 
Series),  544 

Pan,  see  Hymn  to 

Pan's  Anniversary  (Jonson),  225, 
lines  from,  226 


Paradise  Lost  (Milton),  compared  with 
Hyperion,  333 
Echoes  of,  in  Keats's  poems,  90, 154, 
155,  401,  and  in  Shelley's, 
430 
Feast  of  Fruits  in,  401 
Keats's  notes  to,  152 
Keats's  study  of,  and  criticisms  on, 

262,  369 
Titans  in,  428 
Parisina  (Byron),  302 
Park,  Mungo,  246 
Park,   Thomas,   editor  of  Heliconia, 

157  n. 
Pamaso  Italiano,  Hunt's  reading  of,  44 
Parsons,  Keats  on,  335 
Parthenon  Marbles,  see  Elgin  Marbles 
Pastoral   spirit   of   the   Elizabethans 
blent  with  love  of  Country 
Pleasures,  and  Renaissance 
delight  in  Classic  Poetry, 
re-emergence    in    Keats's 
poetry,  226 
Patmore,  Coventry,  300;  and  Milnes's 
Life  of  Keats,  531, 540, 542 
Pause,  the,  in  metre,  94-5 
Peacock,  Thomas  Love,  Keats  on,  263 
Letter  to,  from  Shelley,  on  Hyperion, 

482 

Poem  by,  metre  of,  and  similarity 

of  subject  to  Lamia,  405 

Penseroso,  U  (Milton),  metre  of,  386 

Peona,  in  Endymion,  177,  202,  203. 

204;     the    confession    to, 

178,  her     expostulation, 

179,  and  his  defence,  180 
et  sqq. 

Percy's  Reliques,  107 

'Peter  Corcoran,'  in  Reynolds's  The 
Fancy,  475  &  n. 

Peter  Bell  (Wordsworth),  skit  on,  by 
Reynolds:  notice  of  the 
latter  by  Keats,  348 

Petersburg,  Brown's  connection  with, 
142 

*Pet  lamb'  phrase,  in  the  Ode  to 
Ifidolmce,  415 

Pharonnida  (CKamberlayne),  charac- 
ter of  the  verse  of  in,  100-1 

Philaster  (Beaumont  and  Fletcher), 
phrase  from,  adapted  by 
Keats  in  his  epitaph,  510 

Philips,  Katherine  (Orinda),  poems 
of,  Keats  on,  150;  use  by, 
of  the  Heroic  couplet,  103 

Philological  Journal  of  Chicago  Uni- 
versity, article  in,  on 
Keats,  398  n. 

Philosophy,  Keats's  use  of  the  word, 
266 


588 


INDEX 


Pidgeon,  Miss,  Keats's  fellow-passen- 
ger, 488,  489,  499 
Piron,  allusions  to,  by  Lockhart,  309 
Pisa,  517,  522 

Adonais  printed  at,  519 
Plato,  and  the  myths  of  the  Aphro- 
dites,      Pand^mos       and 
Urania,  549  n.  i 
Shelley's  enthusiasm  for;    Keats's 
indirect  knowledge  of,  237 
Plays,  Keats's  ambition  to  write,  381 
Plymouth     and     Devonport     Weekly 
Journal,   Brown's  touring 
diary  published  in,  273  n. 
Poems,  Keats's  first  book,  its  spirit  and 
contents,  85  et  sqq.;   pub- 
lication   of,    164;     public 
reception  of,  and  Reviews 
on,  130-3,  311 
Sonnet  dedicating  it  to  Hunt,  83, 
90,  and  the  reply,  130-1 
Poems,  long.  Hunt's  adverse  view  on; 
controverted  by  Keats,  165 
Poet,    the.    Death-bed    feelings    of, 
Keats  on,  in  the  Ejnstle 
to  George  Keats,  112 
Prime  endowments  of,  Keats  on,  165 
Wordsworth's  doctrine  on,   233-4, 
endorsed  by  Keats  and  by 
Shelley,  234  et  sqq. 
Poet,  The,  a  fragment  (Keats),  425 
Poetic  license  revived  by  Keats,  207 
Revolution,  the  captains  of,   108, 

118,  119,  207 
Style,  Hunt's  views  on,  47,  49 
Poetical  Sketches  (Blake),  on  the  older 

style  of  verse,  107 
Poetry, 
Keats  on 
Axioms,  254 
Conception  of,  252-3 
His  own  need  of,  136 
Polar  Star  of,  165 
New,  arising  from  the  worid  war, 

647-8 
Renaissance  of,  in  England,  1, 21, 82 
Romantic,   19th  century,  Morris's 
perhaps  the  last  of,  539 
Weirdness  and  terror  in  the  early 
period,  396 
Technique  of,  Keats's  insight  into,  38 
Polymetis  (Spence),  picture  in,  200, 
possibly   inspiring   Keats, 
200,231 
Polyphemus  and  Galatea  story;  Ovid's 
version,  and  Keats's,  201, 
204 
Pope,  Alexander,  428 
Poems  of  (and  of  his  school),  Bjron's 
championship  of,  480 


Pope,  Alexander — continued 
Poems  of — continued 

Early  Victorian  depreciation  of, 

537 
Keats's  dislike  of,   18,  31,  139, 
393 
Use  by,  of  the  heroic  couplet,  long 
ascendancy  of  his  method, 
104,     106-7;      illustration 
and  contrast  with  Shake- 
speare, 105-6 
on  'our  rustic  vein'  in  poetry,  207 

Pope-Boileau  passage  in  SUey  and 
Poetry,  Blackwood  on, 
307;  Byron's  rage  at, 
480-1 

Popular  Antiquities  (Brand),  on  the 
legend  of  St  Agnes'  Eve, 
397 

Popular  Tales  of  the  West  Highlands 
(Campbell),  on  the  Goylen 
story,  291  n. 

Porphyro,  in  Eve  of  St  Agnes,  401  et 
sqq. 

Porter,  Jane,  and  Anna  Maria,  works 
of,  and  encouragement  by, 
of  Keats,  325 
Pen  portraits  by  the  former,  326 

Portsmouth,  Keats's  landing  at,  491 

Poultry,  The,  home  at,  of  the  Keats 
brothers,  28,  38,  40  n., 
135 

Poussin,  Nicholas,  picture  by,  inspira- 
tion of,  to  Keats,  198,  219, 
416 

Prayer,  Haydon's  letter  on,  to  Keats, 
62,  138-9 

Pre-Raphaelitism,  evoking  cause,  325 

Pre  -  Raphaelitism  and  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite  Brotherhood 
(Morris),  538  n. 

Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood,  enthus- 
iasm of,  for  Keats,  as  shown 
by  its  paintings,  538 
and  The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  439 

Prelude,  The  (Wordsworth),  128;  the 
last  published  passages  in, 
250-1;  the  Mystic  SheU 
in,  Mackail  on,  196  n. 

Prince  Regent,  the,  and  The  Examiner, 
42;  Moore's  skits  on,  43 

Pride  in  his  work,  Keats  on,  364  & 
see  n.  i 

Prior,  Matthew,  metre  of  his  day,  86 

Procter,  Bryan  Waller  (Barry  Corn- 
wall), 321  n.;  kindness  of, 
to  Keats,  459 
Poem  by,  on  the  same  subject  as 

Isabella,  459 
Style  of,  Shelley's  disgust  at,  482 


INDEX 


589 


Procter,  Bryan  Waller — continued 
on  Keats's  manner,  conversation  and 

appearance,  459  n. 
on  the  Lambs*  evening  parties,  68 
on  Leigh  Hunt,  47  n. 
Procter,  Mrs,  321  n.;  on  Keats's  eyes, 

466 
Prometheus    Unbound    (Shelley),    89; 
Keats     echoes     in,     239; 
lines  cited,  240 
Keats  on,  in  advance,  467 
Review  of,  in  Blackwood,  477-8 
Proper  Wooing  Song,  A,  echo  of,  by 

Keats,  157-8 
Prothero,  George,  528  n.  i 
Prowse,  Mrs,  and  Keats,  262 
Psyche  (Tighe),  19,  412 
Punning,  327 

Purgatory  (Dante),  the  Eagle  in,  186 
Pymmes  Brook,  tJie,  Keats's  allusions 
to,  10 

QUARTERLY  Review,  The,  77 
Harsh  criticisms  in,  299 
on  Endymion,  137,  310-11.  476, 

627-8 
Influence  of,  316,  Keats  on,  341 
Keats's  illness  ascribed  to,  by  his 
friends,  516  et  sqq. 
Politics,  publisher  and  rivals  of,  297 
Review  in,  of  Tennyson's  poems, 
527-8 
Queen  Lab,  oriental  counterpart  of 
Circe,  195 

RACCOLTA  of  Prints  by  Zanconi,  325  n. 
Raebum,  Sir  Henry,  portrait  by,  of 

the  Countess  of  Northamp- 
ton singing,  525 
Rainbow,  The  (Campbell),  echoed  by 

Keats,  408-9 
Rawlings,  Mrs,  see  Keats,  Mrs  Thomas 
Rawlings,     William,     stepfather     of 

Keats,  8-9 
Rawlings  v.  Jennings,  15  n. 
'Read  Me  a  Lesson,  Muse^  see  Ben 

Nevis,  sonnet 
Recollections     of     Writers     (Cowden 

Clarke),  13  n. 
Redding,  Cyrus,  473,  and  Galignani's 

edition  of  Keats's  and  other 

poems,  527  n.  2 
Redgauntlet  (Scott),  the  dancing  dame 

in,  277  n. 
Reflector,  edited  by  Hunt,  46 

Lamb's  Specimens  printed  in,  388  n. 
Regalities,  Keats  on,  in  Endymion,  189 
Rejected  Addresses,  533 
Reminiscences    of    a    Literary    Life 

(Macfarlane),  502  n. 


Restoration    Poets,    compared    with 

Georgian,  207 
Retribution,  or  The  Chieftain's  Daughter 
(Dillon),     Macready     in, 
Keats's  criticism  on,  242 
Reviews,    effect   of,    on   the   public, 
Keats  on,  340-1 

Hostile  to  Keats,  and  their  effect, 
see  Coleridge,  Severn  and 
others  on,  see  also  Black- 
tDood's,  'Cockney  School,' 
Quarterly  Review,  Severn, 
Shelley,  Taylor, '  Z '  articles 
Revolt  of  Islam  (Shelley),  first  title  for, 

73 
Reynolds,  Charlotte,  55,  76 
Reynolds  family,  74;  Keats's  estrange- 
ment from,  465 
Reynolds,  Jane   (later  Mrs  Thomas 
Hood),  55 

Keats's  verses  in  her  album,  76 

Letter  to,  from  Keats,  on  gay  and 
grave,  149 

on  the  date  of  */n  a  drear-nighted 
December,'  158 
Reynolds,  John  Hamilton,  friendship 
of,  with  Keats,  65,  73-6, 
141,  151,  242,  504,  529 

Bailey's  friendship  with,  and  with 
his  family,  134,  341 

Epistle  to,  from  Keats,  389 

Latter  days  of,  533 

as  Lawyer,  75,  76,  533 

Letters  to,  from  Keats,  on  Autumn 
weather,  421-2;  on  being 
Haunted  by  a  Woman's 
shape  and  voice,  316-17; 
on  Confused  and  Clear 
Mental  Images,  263-5;  on 
Endymion,  and  on  Shake- 
speare's sonnets,  153,  on 
iie  intended  preface  to 
Endymion,  269;  on  his 
feelings  on  Life  and  Litera- 
ture (1819),  364;  on  the 
genius  of  Wordsworth  and 
Milton,  266;  on  Human 
life,  267;  on  Isabella;  or. 
The  Pot  of  Basil,  312-13; 
on  leaving  town,  135,  and 
one  from  Carisbrooke, 
135-6;  at  Oxford,  149;  on 
Social  doings,  245;  on  his 
Thirst  for  Knowledge, 
265-6;  on  Thrush  music, 
260,  424;  on  the  two 
Chambers  of  Thought,  267, 
448;  on  the  Visit  to 
Bums's  cottage,  284,  285; 
with  lines  to  Apollo,  257; 


590 


INDEX 


Reynolds,  John  Hamilton — continued 
Letters  to — continued 

from  Winchester,   371   et 
sqq.;      on     Wordsworth's 
dogmatism  and  on  Hmit's, 
252-3 
literary  work  of,  65,  74,  75,  348, 

475  n.,  521,  533 
and  Milnes's  Biography,  533-4 
Medley  by  {The  Fancy),  475  n. 
Poems,  521,  533 
Letters  on,  from  Byron  and  from 

Wordsworth,  74 
Models  of,  74 
Lispired  by  Boccaccio,   259-60, 

333,  389 
Parodies,  74 

Skit  by,  on  Peter  Bell  (Words- 
worth), 348 
Sonnet  to  Keats  (Thy  thoughts, 

dear  Keats),  75 
Sonnet  to  Haydon,  65 
Quarrels  of,  254-5 
Wit  of,  Keats  on,  383 
on  Endymion,  312-13,  and  on  the 

preface  thereto,  269 
on  Fanny  Brawne,  331;  on  hopes 
for  Keats's  recovery,  5 13 ;  on 
/5a6e;/a,  312-13;  on  Keats, 
as  killed  by  the  Reviews,52 1 
Reynolds,  Mariane,  55,  76 

Bailey's  attachment  to,  134,  end 
of,  341 
Reynolds,  Misses 
Keats's  letter  to,  from  Oxford,  147 
Keats's  changed  feelings  for,  337 
Reynolds,  Mr  and  Mrs,  friends  and 

home  of,  74 
Rhododaphne,    poem    (Peacock),    re- 
semblance of,  to  Lamia, 
406,408 
Rice,  James,  friend  of  Reynolds  and 
ofKeats,76, 135, 141,263, 
366,  533 
Help  from,  to  Keats,  486 
Keats's  stayjwith,  at  Shanklin,  357-9 
Letter  to,  from  Keats,  during  his 

illness,  458 
Wit  of,  Keats  on,  383 
Richard,  Duke  of  York,  and  Kean's 
acting  in,  Keats's  criticism 
on,  242-3 
Richard  III.   (Shakespeare),  Keats's 
criticism  of,  and  of  Kean's 
acting  in,  242-4 
Undersea  Imes  in,  Keats's  challeng- 
ing passage  in  Endymion, 
239,    Jeffrey's    praise    of, 
and  Shelley's  assimilation 
of,  239-40 


Richards, ,  wit  of,  Keats  on,  383 

Richardson,    Sir    B.    W.,    on    the 

composition    of    the    line 

'  A  Thing  of  Beauty,'  176  n. 
Rime,  Keats's  faults  in  use  of,  211-12 
Rimed  couplet,  Shelley's  use  of,  241 
Ritchie,  Joseph,  the  explorer,  246  et 

sqq.,  324 
Robin  Hood,  poem  (Keats),  258;  date 

of,  386;    included  in  the 

Lamia  volume,  470 
Robinson,  Clement,  echo  of,  in  Keats, 

158  An. 
Robinson,     Henry      Crabb,     244-5; 

friendly  to  Keats,  251 
on  poems  in  the  Lamia  volume,  483 
on  Wordsworth  at  the  time  of  Keats's 

meeting  with  him,  245  et 

sqq. 
Rob  Roy  (Scott),  Wordsworth's  ad- 
vance criticism  on,  246 
Rob  Roy  (Wordsworth's  ballad),  the 

writer's  estimate  of,  246 
Rogers,  Samuel,  poems  of,  Jeffrey  on, 

528 
Use  by,  of  the  Heroic  couplet,  108 
Roman  laws  on  Infectious  Disease,  508 
Romantic  poetry  of  the  19th  century, 

Morris's  perhaps  the  last 

of,  539 
Weirdness  and  Terror  of,  in  early 

period,  390 
Romaunt  of  the  Rose  (Chaucer),  437 
Rome,  Keats's  journey  to,  and  death 

m,  498,  501,  502  et  sqq., 

512  et  sqq. 
Keats-Shelley  Memorial  at,  542 
Severn  at,  after  Keats's  death,  522, 

530 
Shelley's  burial  place  at,  521 
Rondeau,  the,  Keats's  view  on,  388 
Ronsard,  Pierre,  Ode  of,  to  Michel  de 

I'Hdpital,  on  the  Titans, 

428-9 
Ross,  Sir  John,  and  the  search  for  the 

North- West  passage,  324 
Rossetti,  Dante  Gabriel,  enthusiasms 

of,    and   high   tribute    to 

Keats,  538,  539 
Evocation  in,  of  Pre-Raphaelitism, 

325 
on  The  Eve  of  St  Mark,  437,  439-40 
Rossetti,  William,  on  the  poetry  of 

Shelley  and  of  Keats,  541 
'Rowleyism'  of  The  Eve  of  St  Mark, 

438 
Rune-inscribed  Shell,   in  Endymion, 

196  &  n. 
Ruskin,  John.^nd  others,  praises  by, 

of  the  Ode  to  Psyche,  413 


INDEX 


591 


Ruth  (Wordsworth),  121 
Rydal,   Keats's  visit  to,   in  Words- 
worth's absence,  274 

Sabhina,  Keats's  poem  planned  on, 
495,  504 

*  Sacrifice  to  Apollo,'  picture  by 
Claude,  as  inspiration  to 
Keats,  264 

Sad  Shepherd,  The  (Fletcher),  206 

'Sad  stories  of  the  deaths  of  Kings,' 
Shelley's  outburst  with, 
138  An. 

Safie  (Reynolds),  74 

St  Columb  Major,  the  Keats  of,  5 

St  Paul's  School,  Reynolds  at,  74 

Saintsbury,  Professor,  and  the  debt 
of  Endymion  to  the  Phar- 
onnida  of  Chamberlayne, 
209  n. 

St  Stephen's,  Colman  Street,  burial- 
place  of  Keats's  grand- 
mother, 16  n.  I 

St  Thomas's  Street,  Keats's  "chum- 
mery" at,  28,  30 

Samson  Agonistes  (Milton),  272 

St  Teath,  the  Keats'  of,  4  n.,  5 

Sanctuary,  the,  in  Hyperion,  451-2 

Sandell,  Rowland,  16 

Sandoval  (Llanos),  536 

Sandys,    George,    translation   by,   of 
Ovid's        Metamorphoses, 
Keats's  use  of,  171 
Echoes  of,  in  Keats's  poems,  206, 

224,  428 
Use    in,    of    the   Heroic    Couplet, 
99-100 

San  Giuliano,  Adonais  composed  at, 
517 

Sangrado,  Dr,  origin  of  the  name, 
309  *  n. 

Sappho,  lines  from,  on  Love,  the  limb- 
loosener,  332  «fe  n. 
Poem  of,  on  the  Endymion  legend, 
166  n. 

Sarcophagus  reliefs,  as  inspiration  of 
Keats's  Bacchic  lines,  231 
&  n.,  232 

Satyr,  The,  masque  (Jonson),  and  the 
legend  of  St  Agnes'  Eve, 
396 
Metre  of,  386 

Scenery,  Keats's  attitude  to,  153,  174 
el  sqq. 

Science  and  Poetry,  views  on,  of 
Hunt,  Keats  and  Words- 
worth, 408-11 

Scotland,  Keats's  comments  on,  278, 
282  et  sqq. 

Scott,  Anne,  525 


Scott,  John,  the  *Z'  papers'  denounced 
by,    311;    duel   over,   re- 
sulting in  death  of,  519, 
526 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,  friend  of  Haydon,  62 
Letter  from,  to  Lockhart,  on  his 
method  of  criticism,  305-6 
Poems  of,  21,  49,  108,  537 

Attitude  to,  of  Hunt,  21,  45,  303 
Environment  as  affecting,  1 
Commercial  success  of,  82 
Position  of,  as  poet,  526 
and  his  Publishers,  303 
Relations  of,  with  the  Blackwood 
group  and  Lockhart,  303-6 
in  Rome,  525 

Smile  of,  Haydon  on,  525  n. 
Wordsworth's  sonnet  to,  525  n. 
on  the  Chaldee  Manuscript,  304 
on  Criticism,  305-6 
on  Keats,  525 
Scott,  William  Bell,  on  The  Eve  of 

St  Mark,  440-1 
Scottish  Chiefs,  The  (Porter),  325 
Scottish  Lowlands,  Keats's  tour  in,  278 
Scots  and  Edinburgh  Magazine,   Re- 
view in  of  'Poems,'  132, 
311  *  n. 
Scylla,  in  Endymion,  190  et  sqq. 
Sea,  the,  Keats  on,  149 

Sonnet  on  (Keats),  135 
Selections    from    the    English    Poets 
(Ward),  Arnold's  essay  on 
Keats  in,  543  n. 
Selene,    Artemis,    Diana,    and    the 

Endymion  myth,  116  n. 
Sensations,  Keats's  use  of  the  term, 

155-6,  266 
Sentence-structure,  Keats's  aptitude 
for,  209 
That  of  Endymion  and  of  Pharon- 
nida  compared,  209  n. 
Session  of  the  Poets  (Suckling),  44 
SUhos,  old  French  romance,  imitations 

of,  186  n. 
Severn^  James,  father  of  Joseph,  78; 
wrath  at  Severn's  going  to 
Italy  with  Keats,  488 
Severn,  Arthur,  and  the  lost  drawing 

of  Keats,  495 
Severn,  Joseph,  artistic  gifts  of,  78 
Account  by,   of  the  voyage  with 

Keats  to  Italy,  489  et  sqq. 
and  A  Lover's  Complaint,  492-4 
Attitude    of,    to    Fanny    Brawne, 

33  &  n.,  331 
Drawings  by,  of  Keats  in  his  Berth 
at  sea,  495  (lost);    in  his 
Bed    in    Rome,    511;     at 
NoveUo's    (lost),   328;    a 


592 


INDEX 


Severn,  Joseph — continued 

Drawings  by — continued 

miniature  once  owned  by 
Fanny  Brawne,  533 

Friendship  of,  with  Keats,  77-8, 141, 
262 

Keats's  companion  in  Italy,  487  et 
sqq.'y  devotion  shown  by 
to  the  end,  504  et  sqq.;  and 
the  effect  of  the  Reviews 
on  Keats,  516,  522;  loyalty 
to  Keats,  324;  a  touching 
incident  recorded  by,  524-5 

Letters  from,  to  various  friends  on 
the  journey  to  Italy  and 
Keats's  last  days  there,  489 
et  sqq.,  passim 

Letters  to,  from  Keats's  friends, 
while  in  Rome,  513  et  sqq. 

Life  of,  m  Rome,  530,  536 

Parents  of,  78 

Pictures  by,  380,  487 

Religious  views  of,  71 

Sharp's  Life  of,  new  knowledge  of 
Keats  derived  from,  545 

on  Fanny  Brawne,  330;  on  Keats's 
artistic  instincts,  255-6; 
on  Keats's  eyes,  79;  on 
Keats's  elation  over  a 
meeting  with  Wordsworth, 
250;  on  Keats  as  invalid, 
456;  on  Keats's  Museum 
reveries,  416;  on  the 
True  cause  of  Keats's  dis- 
tress in  his  illness,  534 
Shakespeare,  William,  birth-place  of, 
Keats's  visit  to,  144 

Coleridge's  Lectures  on,  244 

Influence  seen  in  Endymion,  185, 
189,  206,  217,  239 

Keats  compared  with,  537,  543 

Keats's  study  of,  135-6,  430 

Keats  on  his  understanding  of,  254 

Line  by,  criticised  by  Wordsworth,402 

Lines  of,  on  Endymion,  167 

Middle  age  of,  Keats  on,  356 

Negative  capability  of,  253 

Plays  of,  see  under  Names 

Sonnets  of.  Brown's  book  on,  530-1; 
Keats's  appreciation  of,  153 

Use  by,  of  the  couplet  compared 
with  Pope's,  105 
Shakespearean  quality  of  certain  lines 

in  Endymion,  217,  239 
Shanklin,  Keats's  stay  at,  and  writings 
while  there,  357  et  sqq.,  405 
Sharp,  William,  new  Imowledge  of 
Keats  furnished  by  his 
Life  of  Severn,  545 

on  Keats  at  21,  79 


Shelley,  Harriet,  death  of,  70 
Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  245 
Anatomical  studies  of,  29 
Appearance,  voice  and  manner  of, 

70,71 
Challenge  to,  in  Endymion,  189,  239 
Characteristics,     contrasted     with 

those  of  Keats,  72-3 
Debt  of,  to  Endymion,  238,  239-40 
Derivation  and  nature  of  the  beliefs 

sung  by,  220,  540-1 
Devotionto,apparentlyincompatible 
with  full  justice  to  Keats, 
540-1 
Domestic  difficulties  of,  and  gener- 
osity during  that  time  to 
Hunt,  69-70 
Eccentricities  of,  138  &  n. 
Exasperation  of,  with  certain  verse, 

459 
Friendship  of,  with  Hunt,  69  et  sqq., 

515 
Impression  made  on,  by 
the  Alps,  237 

Wordsworth's  Excursion,  233-4 
Influence  of,  seen  in  Endymion,  235 

et  sqq. 
and  Keats,  relations  between,  69, 70, 

71-3,  256,  481,  483 
Keats's  fear  of  being  influenced  by, 

236 
Letter  drafted  by,  to  the  Quarterly 
Review  after  the  attack  on 
Keats,  238      ^ 
Letters  from,  to  Keats,  inviting  him 
to  Italy,  467,  501 
from  Switzerland,  &c.,  compared 
with  those  of  Keats,  from 
the  Lakes,  &c.,  275 
to  Mrs  Leigh  Hunt  on  his  desire 
to  take  care  of  Keats  in 
Italy,  483 
Letters   to,    from   Keats,    on   the 
invitation  to  Italy,   405; 
on  his  own  unripe  men- 
tality, 411 
Poems  of,  see  under  Names 

Allegoric  theme  of  Alastor,  171-2 
Beauty  of  rhythm  used  by,  241 
Cambridge  enthusiasm  for,  520, 

527,  530 
Echoes  in,  of  Milton,  430 
Freedom  of,  from  faults,  50 
Galignani's  edition  of,  159  n.  2, 

527  An.  2 
Gift  of,  to 
Browning,  effect  of,  526 
Keats,  the  reception  of,  467 
Influences  moulding,  241 
Lyrics  in,  241 


INDEX 


593 


Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe — continued 
Poems  of — continued 
Posthumous,    Hazlitt's   criticism 

of,  521-2 
Rossetti's  enthusiasm  for,  536 
Referred  to  by  Hunt  in  Young 

Poets,  54,  69 
Use  by,  of  rimed  couplet,  241 
Publishers  of,  83,  131 
Views  of,   on  the   Blackwood  and 
Quarterly      Reviews      on 
Keats's  poems,  238, 315,516 
Death  of  (1822),  521,  522 
on  Endymion,  238,  467,  481;    on 
Keats's  place  among  the 
Poets,  545;  on  the  Lamia 
volume,  481-3;    on  study 
of  the  great  Poets,  89 
Shenstone,  W.,  poems  of,  19 

Use  by,  of  Spenserian  stanza,  445 
Shepheard's  Calendar,  The,  19 
Sheridan,  Richard  Brinsley,  pension 

of,  481 
Sicilian  Story,  The  (Procter)  ,f identical 
in  subject  with  Isabella,  459 
Sickness,  Keats  on,  263 
Siddons,  Mrs,  on  the  Head  of  Christ 
in  Haydon's  painting,  461 
Sidmouth,  Reynolds's  love  of,  74 
Siege  of  Corinth  (Byron),  tag  from, 

used  by  Keats,  243 
Skiddaw,  Keats's  climb  on,  274,  275-6 
Sleep,    invocations    to,    in    Keats's 

poems,  177 
Sleep  and  Poetry  (Keats),  53,  58,  75  n., 
122 
Adverse  criticism  on,  132 
AflSnities  with  lines  in  Endymion, 

176  n.,  198-9 
Analysis  of,  with  quotations,  115 

et  sqq. 
Date  discussed,  115 
Echoes  in,  of  the  *  Great  Spirits^ 

sonnet,  121 
Haydon  on,  130 
Ideas  in,  448 

Invocation  in,  to  Sleep,  177 
Metre,  diction  and  subject  of,  1 14-15, 

124,  125 
Pope-Boileau  passage  in,  derided  by 
BlacJcvx)od,  307;   wrath  of 
Byron  on,  480-1 
Published  in  Poems,  114,  place  of 

in  the  volume,  115 
References  in,  to  the  intimacy  with 

Hunt,  53-4 
Relation  of,  to  contemporaries,  125, 
and  to  the  Elizabethans, 
124-5 
Use  in,  of  the  couplet,  124-5 


*SmaUy  busy  flames  play  through  the 

fresh-laid   coals'    {To   My 

Brothers)  sonnet  (Keats), 

53 

Included  in  Poems,  90 

Smith,  Horace,  friend  of  Haydon,  62 

Keats's  acquaintance  with,  245 
Smith's  Standard  Library,  first  separate 
collected  edition  of  Keats's 
poems  issued  in,  528  n.  2 
Snook,  John  and  Mrs,  Keats's  visits 

to,  333,  491 
Soames,  William,  82 
Solitude  wrong  for  the  Poet,  Words- 
worth's  doctrine   on,   en- 
dorsed by  Keats  and  Shel- 
ley, 234  et  sqq. 
*Some  Titian  colours  touched  into  real 
life'  (Keats),  from  Epistle 
to  Reynolds,  264 
Somerset,  the  Keates  of,  4  n. 
Song  of  the  Four  Fairies  (Keats),  350, 

441 
Song  of  the  Indian  Maiden  in  Endy- 
mion, fine  quality  of,  225; 
in  style  an  Ode,  411 
Song,     A,     about     Myself     (Keats), 
{'There    was    a    naughty 
boy'),  9-10 
Song,  A,  of  Opposites  (Keats),  263, 

389 
Sonnet-beginnings  of  Dante,  and  of 

Keats,  92  A  w.  I 
Sonnet-forms  employed  by  Keats,  86, 

257 
Sonnet  on  Poems  (Hunt),  130-1 
Sonnet,  written  at  the  end  of   The 
Floure  and  the  Lefe  (Keats), 
75 
Sonnets  by   Keats,   see  under   First 
Lines,  and  Titles 
ia  Poems 
Character  of,  87 
Classes  or  Groups 
Autumn  group,  90-1 
Exceptions 
Chapman  sonnet,  87-8 
Kosciusko  sonnet,  91 
Margate  sonnet,  91 
Leigh  Hunt  group,  90 
Occasional,  87;    the  great  ex- 
ception, 87-8 
Sex-chivalry  group,  89 
Forms  employed,  86 
Haydon  pair,  the,  91 
Problems  of  selection,  91-2 
Sonnets  on  the  Nile  by  Hunt,  Keats, 

and  Shelley,  256 
Sonnets  showing  strain  of  Keats's  love 
affair,  343-4 


594 


INDEX 


So  reaching  back  to  boyhood:  make  me 
ships,  lines  in  Endymion, 
10 
Sosibios,  Vase  of,  Keats's  tracing  of, 

416  &  n. 
Sotheby,  W.,  translator  of  Wieland's 
Oberon,   86-7   <fc  n.,   309 
Stanza  invented  by,  445 
South,  John  Flint,  on  Lucas,  29 
Southey,  Robert,  as  Critic,  299 
Poems  by,  121 

Political  change  of  view  of,  45 
Hazlitt's  fierce  criticism  on,  137 
Spaniards  Inn,  Nightingales  near,  as 

inspiration  to  Keats,  353 
Spanish  Fryar  (Dryden),  as  model  for 
In  a  drear-nighted  Decem- 
ber, 160 
Specimens  of  Early  English  Metrical 
Romance    (Ellis),    the    St 
Agnes'    Eve    legend    in, 
398  n. 
Spence*s    Polymdis,   picture    in,    as 
inspiration  to  Keats,  200, 
231 
Spenser,  Edmimd,  Compound  epithets 
of,    equalled    by    Keats, 
413 
Keats's  delight  in,  19-21,  and  in- 
fluence   of,    seen    in    the 
Poems,  20-1,  22,  23,  31, 
85,  86,  132,  136,  171,  177. 
185,  206,  209,  399 
Lines  of,  on  the  Endymion  story,  167 
Platonism  in  the  Hymns  of,  237 
Sonnet  on,  or  in  imitation  of,  by 

Keats,  postponed,  259 
Use  by  of  the  Heroic  Couplet,  96 
Spenserian  Stanza  unfit  for  satire,  445 

Used  by  Chatterton,  369 
Spirit,    The,    of  the   Age    (Hazlitt), 

251  n. 
Spirit,    The,  of  Man   (ed.  Bridges), 
Keats's  Meg  Merrilees  bal- 
lad included  in,  280  n. 
Staffa  (Keats),  on  Fingal's  Cave,  292-3 
StaflFa,  visited  by  Keats,  291-2 
Stair  Hole,  494 

Stephens,   Henry,   fellow-student   of 
Keats,  28 
on  the  composition  of  *A  thing  of 

Beauty, '  176  <&  n. 
on  the  date  at  which  Keats  entered 

Guy's,  26  n. 
on  Keats  as  Medical  Student,  30-2 
on  Mrs  George  Keats,  271 
Sterling,  John,  on  Keats  and  his  poems 
(1828).  526-7 
on  the  poems  of  Tennyson  and  of 
Keats,  528 


Story,  The,  of  Rimini,  poem  (Hunt), 

34,44 
Aims  of,  47-9,  108-9 
Criticism  of,  in  Blacktoood,  301-3 
Haydon  on,  64 
Keats's  allusion  to,  113 
Lines   quoted   illustrative   of   the 

style,  48 
Stranger,  The,  performed  to  bagpipes, 

Keats  on,  288 
Stratford-on-Avon,  Keats's  visit  to, 

144 
Styx,  the,  429  n. 
Subaltern,  The  (Gleig),  341 
Suddard,  Mary,  critic,  on  Keats's  Un- 

felt.      Unheard,      Unseen, 

157  &  n. 
Suovetaurilia  Urn,  at  Holland  House, 

as  possible  inspiration  to 

Keats,  416  n. 
Superb,  H.M.S.,  and  its  Keats  cap- 
tain, 4 
Surrey  Listitution,  Hazlitt's  lectures 

at,  244,1300 
Swan  and  Hoop  Stables,  birth-place 

of  Keats,  3 
*  Sweet  Philomela,'  lines  by  Browne, 

echoed  by  Keats,  418  n. 
Swinburne,  Algernon  Charles,  metrical 

magic  of,  and  use  by,  of 

the  Heroic  measure,  161 
on  Keats's  poetry,  540,  541 
Symbolism  in  Keats's  poems,  153-4; 

Wordsworth's       influence 

shown  in,  233 

Table    Talk   (Coleridge),    on   the 

meeting    with    Keats    in 

1819,  346-7 
Tales,  his  own,  and  Brown's,  sent  by 

Keats  to  his  brother,  345 
Tales  of  my  Landlord  (Scott),  303 
Talfourd,  Sergeant,  68 
Talk,  A,  with  Coleridge,  in  Comhill  for 

April,  1917,  ed.  Miss  E.  M. 

Green,  cited,  347-8  A  n. 
Tassie,  James,  paste  reproductions  by, 

of  antique  gems,  92,  338 
Taylor,  John,  Keats's  publisher,  7  n., 

335  n.,  513 
Copyright  of  Endymion  bought  by, 

486;  further  financial  help 

from,  509 
Letters  to,  from 
Keats,  on  Cap  and  Bells,  380,  38, 

445  «fe  n. ;    corrections    to 

Endymion,    260;     Endy- 

mion's     confession,     180; 

on  the  journey  to  Italy, 

485-6;    on  his  thirst  for 


INDEX 


595 


Taylor,  John — continued 
Letters  to,  from — continued 
Keats — continued 

knowledge,  265;  on  plans 
for  work,  380-1,  445  n. 
Woodhouse,  on  Keats's  pride,  &c., 

368 
Severn   (unfinished),  on  Keats's 
condition  in  Rome,  506-8 
Literary  standing  of,  133 
Memorial  volume  on  Keats  projected, 
with  Woodhouse,  529;  the 
Woodhouse  transcripts  lent 
by,  to  Milnes,  533 
on  Endymion,  313 
Taylor  and  Hessey,  Messrs,  Keats's 
second     publishers,     133, 
348,  519 
Keats's    applications    to,    for    ad- 
vances on  Endymion,  140, 
141 
Notice  appended  by,  to  Hyperion, 

427 
Steadfast  loyalty  of,  313 
Teignmouth,  George  and  Tom  Keats 
at,  244,  Keats's  letters  to, 
245  et  sqq.;    Keats's  stay 
at,  266  et  sqq.,  429 
Teniers,  Wordsworth's  pun  on,  250 
Tennyson,  Alfred,  fame  of,  537,  538, 
slow  growth  of,  526 
Poems  by 
Alcaics,  38,  257 
Influence  on,  of  Keats,  527 
Quarterly's   criticism   on   (1832), 

.  ?27-8 
Reminiscence  of  Keats,  in  Enid, 

123 

Thackeray's  allusion  to,  537-8 

Sterling's  appreciation  of,  528 

on  the  poetry  of  Keats,  550,  and 

of  Shelley,  541 

Terror,  the,  effect  of,  on  the  Lake 

poets,  45 
Textual  criticism,  perversion  in,  469 
Thaddeus  of  Warsaw  (Porter),  325 
Theocritus,  Echoes  of,  in  Endymion, 
201,  and  in  the  sonnet  on 
Fame,  349-50  &  n.  i 
Endymion    passage    from,     para- 
phrased by  Fletcher,  168 
Theogony  of  Hesiod,  Cooke's  transla- 
tion of,  428 

*  There  is  a  charm  in  footing  slow, '  see 

Lines  written  in  the  High- 
lands 

*  There  was  a  naughty  hoy,'  see  Song 

about  Myself 

*  Think  not  of  it,  sweet  one,  so,'  love- 

lyric  (Keats),  157 


*  This  pleasant  tale  is  like  a  little  copse, ' 

sonnet  on  Floure  and  Lefe 
(Keats),  75 

Thomson,  James,  poems  of,  19 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  23 
Verse  forms  used  in,  108,  445 

'Thought  appalling,'  in  one  version 
of  In  drear-nighted  Decem- 
ber, possible  source  of,  160 

Thoughts  suggested  on  the  banks  of 
Nith  ...  (Wordsworth),  387 
&  n. 

Thrush,  song  of,  Keats's  pleasure  in, 
321,  459,  and  lines  on,  260 

*  Thus  have  I  thought :    and  days  on 

days  have  flown,'  Epistle  to 
Cowden  Clarke  (Keats),  37 
*Thy  thoughts,  dear  Keats,  are  like 
fresh-gathered  leaves,'  son- 
net by  Reynolds,  on  Keats's 
sonnet  on  The  Floure  and 
the  Lefe,  75 
Tighe,  Mrs,  poem  of,  on  Cupid  and 

Psyche,  19,  412 
Times,  The,  39 

'Time's  sea,'  sonnet,  see  To  a  Lady 

seen  for  a  few  moments  at 

Vauxhall 

Tintem  Abbey  (Wordsworth),  ideas  in 

paralleled    in    Sleep    and 

Poetry,  Bridges  on,  126  et 

sqq. 

Passage  in,  discussed  by  Keats,  146 

'Tion,'  or  *shion'  termination,  as  used 

by  Keats,  208 
Titans,  the,  in  Hyperion,  sources  of, 

428  et  sqq. 
Titian's  Bacchus  and  Ariadne  picture, 
as  inspiration  for  Keats,  231 
Tiverton,  the  name  Keat  at,  4  An.,  5 
To  Ailsa  Rock,  sonnet  (Keats),  284 
To  Byron,  sonnet  (Keats),  23,  91 
To  a  Cat,  sonnet  (Keats),  256 
To  Celia  (Jonson),  metre  of,  386 
To  Chatterton,  sonnet  (Keats),  23,  91 
To  G.  A.  W.,  sonnet  (Keats),  89,  270 
To  Hay  don,  sonnet   (Keats),  {'Great 
Spirits'),   65;    echoes   of, 
in  Sleep  and  Poetry,  120; 
included  in  Poems,  91 
To  Hay  don  (sonnet).  With  a  sonnet 
written  on  seeing  the  Elgin 
Marbles  (Keats),  66-7 
To  Kosciusko,  sonnet  (Keats),  91 
To  a  Lady  seen  for  a  few  moments  at 
Vauxhall,  sonnet  (Keats), 
23,  and  the  allied  sonnet, 
258-9 
To  the  Ladies  who  saw  me  crowned, 
sonnet  (Keats),  57 


596 


INDEX 


To  Leigh  Hunt,  Esq.,  Dedication  of 
Poems,  sonnet  (Keats), 
83-90,  130-1 

To  M.  A.  at  Parting,  verses  (Kathe- 
rine  Philips),  Keats's  plea- 
sure in,  150 

Tom  Cribb's  Memorial  to  Congress 
(Moore),  341 

To  my  Brothers,  sonnet  (Keats),  see 
Keen  fitful  gusts;  Small, 
busy  flames;  To  one  who  has 
been  long  in  city  pent 

To  the  Nile,  sonnet  (Keats),  256 

To  one  who  has  been  long  in  city  pent, 
sonnet  (Keats),  in  Poems, 
90 

Tory  critics,  ferocity  of,  matched  by 
Hazlitt  and  others,  137 

To  some  Ladies,  verses  (Keats),  metre 
of,  86 

Townley  (Bacchic)  Vase,  416 

Translation  from  an  Ancient  Chaldee 
Manuscript,  satire,  in 
Blackwood,  301,  302,  303, 
Scott  on,  304 

Trelawny,  Edward  John,  142;  rela- 
tions of,  with  Brown,  522, 
523,  and  with  Shelley,  521 

'Triumph  of  Death,'  picture  by 
Orcagna,  446 

Troilus  and  Criseyde  (Chaucer),  391 

Two  Chambers  of  Thought,  Keats  on, 
267,  448 

Twopenny  Post  Bag,  The  (Moore),  and 
the  Prince-Regent,  43 

'Ugly  Clubs,'  in  Sleep  and  Poetry, 

120-1  &  n. 
Underground  journey  theme  in  Endy- 

mion,  186  &  n. 
Undying  Art,  the  great  poets  on,  417 
^Unfelt,    unheard,    unseen,'    stanzas 

(Keats),  157  &  n. 
Unknown  beloved,  the,  in  Endymion, 

186,  187 
'Unseam/   used  by   Keats   and  by 

Shakespeare,  218  &  n. 
Unwritten  poems,  Keats's  distress  over, 

534,  548 

VAC  A  TION  Exercise  (Milton),  echoed  by 
Keats,  431;  Keats's  know- 
ledge of,  262;  sprightly 
lines  from,  109  n.;  versi 
fication  of,  101-2 

Valentine,  by  Keats,  for  Miss  Wylie, 
see  *Hadst  thou  lived  in 
days  of  old' 

Valleys,  Keats's  love  of,  and  notes  on, 
152 


Van  Staveren's  edition  of  Auctores 
MythographiLatim,Keaits's 
copy  of,  447  &  n. 

Vathelc  (Beckford),  echoes  of,  in 
Endymion,  184 

Vegetable  Diet,  in  Hunt's  circle, 
Wordsworth  on,  250 

Venus  and  Adonis  (Shakespeare), 
beauties  of,  Keats  on,  153 

Verses  written  during  Medical  lecture 
(Keats),  33 

'Versifying  Pet-Lamb,'  phrase  of 
Keats,  356 

Victorian  poets.  The  Newcomes  cited 
on,  537-8 

Victory,  parentage  of,  429  n. 

Villa  Aldobrandini,  sarcophagus  from, 
231  n. 

Villa  Gherardesca,  Landor's  Floren- 
tine home,  530 

Visconti, ,  and  the  Elgin  Marbles, 

59 

Vita  Nuova  (Dante),  sonnet-begin- 
nings in,  92  <fc  n.  I 

Vivar^s,  ,  engraver  of  the  "En- 
chanted Castle,"  265  n. 

Voltaire,     called    dull,     by    Words- 
worth, 247 
Head  of,  in  Haydon's  picture,  462 

Vowel  sounds,  Keats's  use  of,  147, 209, 
401-2 

Voyage  d'AntSnor,  parallel  in,  to  pas- 
sage in  Endymion,  186  n. 

Wade,  Keats's  school-fellow,  pranks 
of,  12 

Walker  Art  Gallery,  Liverpool,  Millais' 
"Isabella"  picture  in,  538 

Waller,  Edmund,  mythological  poetry 
of,  Jonson  on,  220 
Use  by,  of  the  Heroic  Couplet,  102 

Walsh,  Captain  Thomas,  of  the '  Maria 
Crowther,'  kindness  of,  to 
Keats,  488-9,  499 

Walthamstow,  Fanny  Keats  at  school 
at,  147,  337,  462 

War,  the  world's,  as  stimulus  to  Poetry, 
547-8 

Ward,  T.  H.,  Book  by,  containing 
Arnold's  measured  judg- 
ment on  Keats,  543  n. 

Warton,  Joseph,  protest  of,  against 
moral  essays  in  verse,  106, 
echoed  by  Keats,  165 
Use   by,  of   the   Heroic  Couplet, 
107 

Warton,  Thomas,  Poet  Laureate, 
pioneer  of  change  in  spirit 
of  poetry,  106,  107 

Warwickshire,  tlie  Keytes  of,  4 


INDEX 


597 


"Waverley  novels,  authorship  unknown 

(1818),  279 
Way,  Mr,  a  great  Jew-converter,  333 
Way,   G.  L.,   translation  by,   of  Le 

Grand's  Fabliaux,  33  <fe  n.  i, 

552 
Webb,  Cornelius,  verses  by,  gibes  at, 

in    Blackwood,    76,     152, 

301,  307 
Weirdness  and  Terror,  in  Romantic 

poetry,  early  19th  century, 

396 

*  Welcome  Joy,  and  Welcome  Sorrow,' 

see  Song  of  Oppodtes 
Well  Walk,  Hampstead,  home  in,  of 

the  Keats  brothers,  141; 

friends    frequenting    and 

frequented,  141,  167 
Keats's  life  at  (1817-18),  244;   de- 
scribed by  himself,  245  et 

sqq. 
Wells,   ,    of   Redleaf,    owner   of 

Claude's  'Enchanted 

Castle,'  265  n. 
Wells,  Charles,  author  of  Joseph  and 

his  Brethren,  association  of, 

with  Keats,  77 
Hoax    by,    on    Tom    Keats,    77, 

346 
Wentworth  Place,  Hampstead,  Keats's 

life  at,  with  Brown,  320 

et  sqq. 
Wesleyan  Place,  No.  2,  Kentish  To^ti, 

Keats  at,  463 
West,  - — ,  263 
*Whai  is  there  in  the  universal  earth' 

(Intercoronation  sonnet  by 

Keats),  57 
What  the  Thrush  said  (Keats),  260,  424 

*  When  I  have  fears  that  I  may  cease  to 

be,'  sonnet  (Keats),  date, 

subject   and   pendant   of, 

258-9 
'Where's  the  Poet,'  fragment  (Keats), 

425 
Whistleeraft,  Orlando  (J.  H.  Frere),  309 
White  Hart  Hotel,  Bath,  134 
*Who  loves  to  peer,'  sonnet  (Keats), 

see  On  Leigh  Hunt's  Poem 

*  The  Story  of  Rimini' 
'Why  did   I  laugh   to-night,'   sonnet 

(Keats),  343,  text  of,  344 
Wieland,  Endymion  by,  309 

Oberon     by,     translation     of,     by 

Sotheby,  86-7  &  n.,  309 
Stanza  used  in,  445 
Wilkie,  Sir  David,  and  Hunt,  43 
Letter  to,  from  Haydon,  on  Hunt 

and  his  Story  of  Rimini, 

63-4 


Wilson,  Dr  John  ('  Christopher  North') 
ferocious  criticism  by,  137, 
298-9,  300,  301;  on  Lamia 
and  Isabella,  &c.,  477-8, 
527;  on  Shelley's  Prome- 
theus, 477-8 

Winchester,  Keats  and  Brown  at 
(1819),  360,  405;  last 
good  days  spent  there, 
363-4,  work  done  during 
the  stay,  364 

*Wuid,  across  the  barley,'  Keats's 
delight  in,  80 

Windermere,  Keats's  first  sight  of, 
273 

Wobm-n,  carven  sarcophaguses  at, 
231  n. 

•Wolters,  Paul,  on  Keats's  inspira- 
tions from  the  antique, 
416  n. 

*  Woman,  when  I  behold  thee  flippant, 
vain,'  sonnet  (Keats),  34; 
published  in  Poems,  89 

Women,  Keats's  attitude  to,  and  ideal- 
isation of,  81,  89-90,  262, 
271,  288,  318-20,  549;  see 
also  Brawne,  Fanny 

Woodhouse,  Richard,  friend  of  Taylor 

and  of  Keats,    134,    159, 

160,  257  n.,  340;   loyalty 

of,  313 

Letters  of,  to  Taylor  and  another, 

on  Keats,  368 
List  of  Books  in  Keats's  Library, 

compiled  by,  556-8 
Memorial  volume  on  Keats,  planned 
by,  with  Taylor,  529,  see 
Woodhouse  Transcripts 
Sonnet  by,  on  '  Poems, '  131 
on  the  Date  of  In  a  drear-nighted 

December,  158 
on  the  Inspiration  of  the  two 
sonnets  When  I  have  Fears, 
and  Time's  Sea,  and  the 
lines  From  my  despairing 
heart,  259  &  n. 
on  Hyperion,  426-7;  on  Isabella,  on 
Keats's  reading  aloud  and 
on  the  changes  in  Eve  of  St 
Agnes,  366-7;  on  Keats's 
character  and  poetry,  368; 
on  a  Long  talk  with  Keats 
(1819),  366  et  sqq. 

Woodhouse    Transcripts    in    Crewe 
MSS.,  259  n. 
Lent  by  Taylor  to  Milnes,  533 

WooUett,  W.,  engraver  of  'The 
Enchanted  Castle,'  265  n. 

*Word-of-all-work,  Love,'  phrase  of 
George  Eliot,  549  n. 


598 


INDEX 


Words,  lax  use  of,  and  free  modifica- 
tion    of,     in     Endymiorit 
212-13 
Wordsworth,  Dorothy,  250,  290 
Wordsworth,  Mrs,  250 
Wordsworth,  Rev  Christopher,  245 
Wordsworth,   William,    244;    absent 
on  Keats's  visit  to  Rydal, 
274 
Appearance,    voice,    manner    and 

mannerisms  of,  79,  249 
Bailey's  acquaintance  with,  133 
Characteristics  of,  246,  249,  315 
Conversation  of,  Hazlitt  on,  251 
Fame  of,  steady  growth  of,  526 
Friendship  of,  with  Haydon,   62, 

462  A  n. 
Genius  of,  compared  with  that  of 
Keats,    234,    267-8,    484; 
Bridges  and  the  author  on, 
128-9 
in  relation  to  that  of  Milton, 
Keats  on,  266 
and  Greek  mythology,  125-6,  220 
Head    of,    in    Haydon's    picture, 

462  An. 
Hunt's  verdict  on,  44 
Keats's  meeting  with  and  relations 

with,  245  et  sqq. 
and  Kingston,  246  et  sqq.,  251 
Letter  from,  to  Reynolds  on  his 

poem  The  Naiad,  64 
Poetry  of,  21,  196  n. 
Disuse  in,  of  the  older  verse  forms, 

108.  119 
Influence  of,  on  Keats,  seen  in 
Endymian,  125,  126,  233-4 
La  Belle  Dame,  350 
Keats's  appreciation  of,  145-6,  and 
critical     judgments     on, 
251-2,  263,  267 
Local  influences  on,  2 
Poems  of  humble  life,  attitude 
to,  of  the  Himt  circle,  121, 
348 
Poems  of  tragic  life,  121 
Stanzas  on  Bums,  countered  by 
Keats  in  *  Bards  of  Pas- 
sion,' 387 
Political  change  of  view  of,  45 
Reminiscence   of,   in  the   Solitude 
sonnet  by  Keats,  90 


Wordsworth,  William — continued 
Reminiscence  of — continued 
Sonnets 
of  God-speed  to  Scott,  525  n. 
to  Haydon,  three,  65 
Scotch   tour   of,    witji   his   sister, 

290 
Wilson's    attitude    to,    in    Noctes 

Ambrosiance,  300 
on  Keats's  Hymn  to  Pan,  227.  249; 
on  the  Poetic  Revolution, 
119;    on   the   Sources   of 
poetic  Inspiration,  89;   on 
Vowel-variation,  401-2 
World-sadness,  Keats  on,  and  on  the 
duty  of  relieving  it,  448-9 
et  sqq. 
Written  on  the  day  that  Mr  Leigh 
Hunt  l^t  Prison,   sonnet 
(Keats),  23 
Written  in  disgust  of  Vulgar  Super- 
stition,    sonnet     (Keats), 
91 
Wylie,    Georgiana    Augusta    (after- 
wards Mrs  George  Keats, 
and    later    Mrs    Jeffrey), 
141;     engagement   of.    to 
George  Keats,  24,  34 
Keats's  poems  written  for,  34,  86, 

89,  269,  270 
Marriage  of,  268,  269,  271;  second 
marriage,  331;  hereafter 
see  Jeffrey,  Mrs,  and 
Keats.  George  and  his 
wife 
Wylie  family.  366 

YOUNG  POETS,  essay  (Hunt) 
Beginners  of  promise  referred  to. 

54,69 
Keats's  Chapman  Sonnet  printed  in, 
54 
*You  say  you  love,  hut  with  a  voice,' 
love-plaint      by      Keats, 
Elizabethan  echo  in,  157-8 

*Z*  Papers  in  BlachtDood,  gibes  of 
at  Hunt  and  Keats,  301-3, 
307-8,  474;  fatal  duel 
fought  over,  519 

*Zack,'  4 

Zanconi,  Milanese  prints  by,  325  n. 


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